What kind of range are you getting with the NRF24s? I'm thinking about playing with some R/C (boat/car/plane) ideas, but in the spirit of being a cheapskate I don't want to splash out 60 quid on a transmiter/receiver when I have various microcontrollers and xbox pads laying around.
Not a great deal in the house. I think I posted a video of someone testing the range of them with different antena types with those radios. They can go surprisingly far outside.
A mile?! OK I think they'll do fine for outside stuff!
Think I'll make a box with an arduino or Pi that has an nrf24 (with antena!) and a screen and maybe a few interface buttons to load/save profiles, and connect a 360 pad to it for a r/c controller. Fun project for the summer.
I'm thinking definitely a car and a boat, and a plane if I get adventurous/find some spare cash for a decent motor/prop.
There's definitely some decent quoted distances online.
I've got a huge antenna on my RPi and the regular antenna on my kitchen sensor and it sometimes drops out. That's only going through 2 walls, one being a fairly thick brick wall, oh and the RPi is next to the consumer unit so there might be a bit of noise there. Changing the 2.4GHz channel might help for me. If you're out in the open with very little 2.4GHz interference you should definitely get much better distances.
I thought they did frequency hopping? Or is that something else. I think for anything flying some fairly robust frequency hopping spread spectrum stuff would be a necessity. With all the unregulated stuff on 2.4 Ghz you never know when some random device could totally knock out your comms.
You can definitely set the channel. I assume it uses a default channel if you don't set one manually. There's a scanner sketch for the Arduino, maybe the Pi too, which shows interference on each channel.
And my heating didn't come on at the start of the week. I tried loading my web interface and it said "Can't connect to boiler :(" I thought something was broken but the radio connected to my Pi had slipped down the side of my subwoofer behind the telly and blocked the signal.