Arduino IDE friendly Ethernet development board with ADC?

Question

As my introduction into an IoT project, I thought I'd build a simple home communication system for my family. It has been a very entertaining and eye-opening experience so far. My original plan was to have each hand held device equipped with a microphone and ESP8266 development board that publishes audio data to my MQTT broker. From there, any of my family members can access this data from an android and iOS app I'm also building.

When my friends learnt what I was doing, they asked if I can do the same for their families.

So now I'm trying to consider a more portable solution such as:

1. I don't want to drive around the city to compile new Wifi credentials for each ESP8266 unit every time home owners change their Wifi credentials. Is there a way to store wifi credentials on the development board for easier manipulation during run time?

2. Is there an Arduino IDE compatible development board that is comparable to ESP8266, but operates on an ethernet wired connection instead of wifi? That way I can use that as a base station by connecting it to the family's home internet router. Then I use a radio frequency module in both the base station and the hand held units as a way to connect them? I suppose I can use the Arduino with an Ethernet shield, but that seems to be substantially more costly than the ESP8266. I prefer Arduino IDE compatibility for now to make my education more manageable in the near future.

Not sure if there's something else to consider?

Answer 1

This looks like it might be what you're asking for:

• https://hackaday.com/2016/04/01/ethernet-controller-discovered-in-the-esp8266/
• https://esp8266hints.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/adding-an-ethernet-port-to-your-esp-revisited/

I'm not sure how large the audio files are, so that's a potential limitation. However, you could easily create a BLE network using a few Particle Xenon devices. Grab an ethernet featherwing to easily add your wired connection for the base station.

The Xenon runs on firmware very similar to Arduino.

Otherwise look at the Arduino MKR series.

Answer 2

1. You can store it in the EEPROM. The other solution is to have the ESP8266 act as an AP if it loses WiFi connection over a longer time.

2. There are ethernet shields to Arduino based on chip ws5100 or ENC28Jxx, both uses SPI to interface with the MCU so it could be interfaced with an ESP8266 as well. Check out https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/tree/master/libraries/Ethernet