new Arduino wireless library

Question

I have been working on a wireless library for arduino. I have it working around 50 percent of the time but would like to increase its reliability. I posted to the arduino forum and will put in a link to that post.

http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=278649.0

It is for single line transmitting. Basically if the line on the transmitter goes high the line on the receiver goes high for the same amount of time. This code works but is not yet very reliable. I have looked into the RadioHead library but would like to write my own library for basic data transmission. I would appreciate any help.

shabaz · Answer

Unfortunately it's not about the code (what you've written is a very small amount in the space of things so you can afford to do a re-write), but more about the encoding algorithm to get any value out of these cheap transmitter/receiver devices.

In other words, if you continue trying to adapt your current code, you won't achieve more than the reliability you're getting now (maybe 10-20% reliability for each transmitted byte - but depends on conditions; it could be a lot worse, or better).

It's not because of your code, but because the cheap devices are so crude.

If you look at the RadioHead library, it is well-commented so you can see what it does, and what you'd need to implement if you wish to write your own library. The header files have a lot of information too, including URLs for further theory.

You're looking at around 1k lines of code possibly if you wish to write your own. 1k lines of code takes a very long time to test - probably expect 100 bugs in it, so time to iron those out needs to be factored in too : (

For a little bit more money (e.g. the nRFxxxx series) you'll get much better performance, and need less code.