Atmel WINC1500 - Wifi/IoT Network Controller 

sample imageJust something else to play around with.

Below is Atmel's SAM D21 Xplained Pro mother board, with the ATWINC1500-XPRO ISM Wifi module, and the IO1Xplained Pro Extension board.

The SAM D21 Xplained is a 32-bit ARM Cortex microcontroller mounted on an IO expansion board.  Connected to this is the ATWINC1500, which is an IEEE 802.11 b/g/n IoT network controller module.  Also connected, is the IO1 Xplained Pro Extension board which adds some sensors and memory to the setup.

 I bought them last year but just started messing around with them.  I wanted to integrate my drones with my alarms system.  How cool would it be if one of the door or window sensors detect someone and then have one of my drones launch itself with a camera.  An Eye in the Sky.

In any case, the coding is straight forward, but there is a lot of documentation.  Below is just some test code to light it up.  Three days to get that little red LED on the Wifi board to light up and to get a signature on the spectrum analyzer.  Amazing what an Engineer will do for entertainment.

I set the channel frequency to 2.477GHz, that would be right between channels 13 & 14.  The 2.4GHz ISM Wifi band is crowded.  It's hard to see the frequency peaks with all the Wifi traffic.  The separation between channel centers in the 2.4GHz band is 5MHz for channels 1 through 13.  The separation between channel 13 and 14 is 12MHz, so there is a little 'sandbox' band to play in.

Anyway, this is where I am at.  As I get the time I'll update this page.