Murphy’s Law waiting to happen
Things can get very messy very quickly when trying to set up a wireless sensor network. Let’s say for example you are using the NRF24L01+ and want to have several nodes positioned around your house. Each node needs a microcontroller on it and a power source of some kind.
You can put together a circuit on a breadboard or some strip-board. But knock just one of those jumper wires loose or bridge a connection during soldering and you’ll spend ages when chasing down the problem. Having a dedicated board makes the process much less painful and reduces the number of things that can go wrong.
With electronics people start off learning Ohms law and so on, but the law they don’t teach is Murphy’s law. What can go wrong will go wrong.
Sure, you can spin your own board, but if your main goal is getting a stable sensor network up and running you start looking around for shortcuts. This offering takes care of microcontroller, regulated power, and two wireless module footprints in one small outline. The board supports the NRF24 wireless transceiver and a Bluetooth module.
The voltage regulator used is the MCP1703 made by Microchip. This regulator has a crazy low quiescent current draw of only 2uA meaning this board is suitable for use with battery powered applications that need to last a long time. With this board, all you have to do is plug in your NRF / Bluetooth transceiver, hook up a power source, program the microcontroller, and you are good to go. The ATmega328P has tons of Arduino Libraries available for it so you can get your project up and running quickly and easily.
