WiLAN IC?

So I was reading about the PICAXE netserver board you could buy and I thought cool - until I noticed it required you to plug in a cat 5 cable. That is a pain because I would have to run all that cable to get my project to work. But if I could use wifi instead of cat 5 - well that would be awesome. I looked around the net and mainly found the suppliers of WIFI chips to card makers and phone makers - but didn't see anything geared to the hobbiest.

Has anyone here worked with wifi ICs or used WIFI in any of their projects?

Thanks

I don't think it's as simple as you would like. You can buy ethernet-to-wifi bridge devices that are specifically designed to allow an ethernet device to easily connect to a wifi network with just the addition of a single, small device, however they're not extremely common, and thus not usually very cheap. One example is the Linksys WET54G, which seems to run about $80-90.

My guess as to why they are so expensive is that like many peripherals nowadays, wireless PCI/PCMCIA/USB adapters for PC's probably offload a lot of the processing work onto the computer itself. To connect to a wireless network with a generic ethernet-capable device in a seamless, driverless manner, the wireless ethernet bridge would have to do all the processing work itself, increasing the complexity and cost.

Even if there was a neat single-chip solution for adding wifi like you are looking for, wifi operates at 2.4GHz so you can't just throw something together on a cheap PCB - you would need some advanced skills and fabrication to even be able to attempt to build the RF power stage of the device, and the difficulties would certainly be prohibitive enough to make the whole project more trouble and cost than it was worth.

So this is a component here that seems to run around $125 - $150 USD. Looks pretty cool. It does wifi to serial / ethernet. Allows you to control your projects from anywhere on the internet.


I would have liked to see the price around $50 - $75 though. Anyone tried this - or seen anything similar?

https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2007/03/WiPort_PB.pdf