DIY wireless, possible or not?

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1

Hi guys!

Sometime ago i had an idea in my mind about a DIY wireless link between, say, two MCUs. But the point is that i never tested it. I just wanted to know what you thought about it and if you think it could work (you are the electronic gurus after all :) )

It should work like this.

-Receiver has the antenna attached to the base of a darlington, and the signal received goes to the MCU (if not enough maybe i could make a bigger darlington, maybe three NPNs)

-Sender has an antenna attached to a high output pin of an MCU (or connected via a transistor to increase current). This signal is pulsed at 38kHz (just an example)

Now, the receiver would need some software way to decode the signal which is "encoded" at 38kHz. What i thought about is counting the pulses received to determine the frequency (to see if it is acceptable or not) and then try to decode the signal by counting how much the input stays HIGH or LOW.

Problem is: i guess with this setup you would need a common ground. And that's a big problem :)

What do you think about it?

2

You won’t need a common

You won’t need a common ground for radio transmissions. It’s been a while since I’ve dabbled in telecom but one solution you could implement would be to use the carrier (38kHz) wave as your “ONE” and dead air as “ZERO”, I.E. pulsing the 38kHz generator, which would be easy enough to do, thought probably not the best way to go about this.

Actually…re-reading your post makes me think that’s what your intention was. Am I correct?

Look into small radio transmitter/receiver packages that run at 433, 868 and 915Mhz. This is in the “hobby band” of the radio frequency spectrum and tons of small devices use these, you may be able to get some ideas from those. On the other hand, if there is a simpler solution, I’m all for it!