Every now and then there comes a product so awesome that you can't even quite believe it's true.

We searched high and low across every known WiFi module and after much experimentation came up with one that is a great price, is quite easy to use and perfect for connecting to low-power microcontrollers.

The WRL-3000 module is based on the TI CC3000, which gives you Smart Config (automatic config of the module's WiFi parameters by simply using a iPhone or Android app), and multiple server and client sockets.  You can scan for access points, grab the information about each access point one by one and grab as much (or as little) data from a socket when you want it.  This is so important for microcontrollers!  In the Internet world, any single packet of TCP/IP goodness if often 1,500 bytes - which can be more memory than the entire microcontroller has.

The WRL-3000 uses an SPI port plus a couple of pins for interrupts, chip select and enable.  It provides a complete WiFi 802.11b/g stack and a complete TCP/IP stack.  Once we had the API ported to our internal development platform, we were sending alerts to iPhones via Prowl and uploading sensor data to Cosm in minutes.

While we are delighted to provide our simple development library for your own purposes, we would love to include your updates or ports onto other platforms here for others to enjoy.  Please email us at support [at] embeddedadventures.com if you have any contributions, or any questions.

Note that this module runs at 3.3V. If there is enough demand we will bring out a 5V version, so let us know if this interests you.