I always enjoy playing with wireless technologies, so the next logical step was wifi. I purchased a surface mount transceiver from RovingNetworks and proceeded to make my own dongle to it.

I put a six-pin header on it with a matching pinout to an FTDI cable I own for ease of debugging. Since the chip uses 3.3v logic levels, I put a switch in that allows you to use a microcontroller that runs at 3.3v or 5v without a problem. It also has four different leds on it to show power and the state of the chip.

For a quick demonstration I made a GUI in TouchOSC and connected to the board on my local network at home. I can then drive around a robot using a simple 4 button controller.

If you would like to learn more, don’t hesitate to ask.  Here are some pictures and a video of my robot in action.