• hi, I wonder what type of wireless communication would be optimal for sending and receiving data between two espruinos? I thought about 1-1,5km distance.
    bluetooth and wifi working range would be to short? any ideas?

  • There's something called LoRA - actually there's a KickStarter for someone trying to start a network with it running now

    There's a module called the SX1276 that looks good - modtronix sell them here

    You'd have to write drivers for them (I have plans to do it at some point) but it doesn't look too difficult.

  • looks very interesting, I would like to send from one espruino pwm signal to drive motor at other side (up to 1.5km away), trigger function would be necessary as if I push trigger harder would like to get faster speed of the motor and decrease it when trigger has low tension or switch off when the trigger is released

  • You would be sending a message to the Espruino at the other end, instructing it to set the PWM output to a specific duty cycle.

    You do need a microcontroller on both ends.

  • ESP8266 modules with pcb trace antennas have a range of about 0.35km, but tests on youtube indicate you can get a little over 4km range between an esp8266 module with trace antenna and a Ubiquiti NanoBridge M2 access point - these are simply fairly powerful wifi APs with a directional antenna. Some ESP8266 boards include a u/fl coaxial antenna connector, so you can plug in an external 2.4ghz antenna. If you put a directional antenna on each end, I bet you'd get some truly awesome range. That's how I'd try and do it.

    Have you thought about using regular RC radio tech, like the kind used for remote control cars and stuff? It's quite resistant to interference, long range, and available very cheaply on sites like hobbyking. You might not need any microcontrollers at all!

  • hi lads, I thought to use 2 espruinos at both sides and some communication between them,
    esp8266 looks interesting or no microcontroller way but firstly I want something simple and reliable, and range would be max 1.5km

  • I think the LoRa radio as Gordon suggested is the right way to go, with an Espruino on each end. (Part of why I specified that you need a microcontroller at each end is that just about every day someone posts on the Arduino forums trying to use 433mhz cheapo-RF without a microcontroller on one end, and we have to explain to them why that doesn't work)

    IMO, trying to push WiFi to get that kind of range out of it is not a winning proposition. Not for this sort of thing anyway...

  • WiFi is fairly commonly run over 20-30km ranges with bridge devices like the NanoBridge, for point to point data links. The radios in those devices aren't much more powerful than a common home wifi router. There's certainly no distance limitation on WiFi to make it unsuitable over long distances.

  • Wifi does have a distance limitation, which is the ACK time-out. On devices built for long distances you can increase it from the default value. I don't know what it's set at on the esp8266 and I don't remember seeing a way to increase it. So it may or may not bite you ;-)

  • 1.5km... sure: a linear amp on both side on a ESP8266 can do so... but that gets you into different problems. In case you have line of sight, directional antennas can help... but 300m is already a challenge...

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Long range wireless comunication between two Espruino boards?

Posted by Avatar for bigplik @bigplik

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