ArduinoUNO WiFi Rev.2 [ABX00021] – Enhanced Microcontroller with Built-in WiFi, Secure Connectivity & Advanced Features

I supported arduino in my first ever attempt to use microcontrollers. I bought this Original Arduino WiFi rev2 and a starter kit. Much of my initial work and concept would not have been possible had I not found their site about connecting two arduino over tcp client server. So it’s only fair that I return the support. Please make sure you install the correct MegaAVR boards and Library WiFiNINA to get your project to work. I had no issues with the board so far.

My first Arduino board is more than 10 years old and refuses to accept any downloads. I bought this one because it has WiFi builtin and I will need all 14 digital pins for my project. We will be connecting to it with Bluetooth from just a few feet away, so the range is not an issue for me.The Arduino IDE did insist on installing the package for the CPU on this board, it seems to work without having to resort to downloading another package.Cons: Why the H did they put a "printer" USB connector on this? What's wrong with the standard micro USB or USB-C? All I can think of is they were on sale. I was surprised that I still had one lying around.

This is a decent board once you figure out the quirks, I’ll share what I learned to help get you started. First limitation to know is that it only supports 2.4 GHz WiFi, not 5 GHz. You can use Bluetooth or WiFi but not both at the same time. The WiFi range isn’t great—the antenna is small so don’t expect it to work as far away as normal devices do. If the location is more than 30 feet from the AP/router in a busy environment, you could start to have problems with data quality and reception. When you get the board and install the Arduino IDE software, you need to go into the board manager and install the “Arduino megaAVR Boards” package and select the correct board from the list before it will work (the one it prompts you to install incorrect).Next you should update the WiFi firmware. The firmware included with the current Arduino IDE is outdated, so you have to install the nightly build version of the IDE from their website temporarily to get the latest firmware. Install the WiFiNINA library and upload the FirmwareUpdater sketch found the examples menu. Then you can use the WiFiNINA Firmware Updater under the tools menu to update it. If you don't update the WiFi firmware you can have some strange issues that are difficult to solve, so just do it first.You can use the example sketches to try to connect to WiFi. Be careful if you have a backslash (\) or double quote (") in your WiFi password, if you do then you need to escape them by putting an extra backslash in front of the problem character.Make sure you include a check in your code if you are still connected to WiFi like the examples. That way it should reconnect if the signal is bad or gets booted. However, DHCP leases are still a problem. If the lease expires, the Arduino will stay connected to WiFi but won’t be able to communicate. You can give your Arduino a static DHCP lease on your router to avoid this. Another method I use is to ping Google or Cloudflare every so often, and if that fails, disconnect the WiFi and reconnect. You must disconnect and reconnect from WiFi to renew the DHCP lease since there’s not another way that I’m aware. This happens every 24 hours on most routers.Make sure your code checks for data integrity somehow, you should expect there will be some data corruption and errors especially if the network is busy. The buffers aren’t the best and the small amount available memory makes it hard to improve that. If you are dealing with large amounts of data, need an error rate less than 1%, or it’s time critical (e.g. need to respond in less than a second), I suggest going with something with a full network stack like a Raspberry Pi.Last thing to be aware of are sockets. By default you get 10, so if you forget to close them after a failed attempt, then it will stop working after 10 communication errors.A lot of people have trouble with them disconnecting randomly. That can happen, and you have to make sure your code knows how to fix the connection (things I mentioned above). I strongly recommend you put enough serial prints in your code to track what’s going on, and then log the serial output for at least 24 hours to check for any potential problems before calling it good. Sometimes it takes a day for a problem to show up with the network stuff.I’m using mine to go get a forecast every so often, it seems to be working acceptably after figuring out all of the above. Know that it can be slow, especially if it needs to ping something or reconnect, it might take 5 or 10 seconds for a response in some cases. That’s not an issue in my case, but for some applications it might be. Also don’t expect it to handle multiple simultaneous connections very well, that will probably cause lag and potential data loss. Overall this board has a lot of versatility, just know the network aspect is going to have some limitations but it should work well enough for simplistic applications like getting a forecast, posting data, communicating with a Bluetooth device, very basic web server, etc. Price is a little steep, but this is probably one of the easier WiFi boards to work with as a beginner.

The first board I ordered worked well, I was able to create a little pool monitor with it and I ordered another one for a dev board.Pros:no extra Devices to attach to connect to wifi:Easy to work with once I got the right library loaded for it.Con:Range on it is not that strong. I wanted to mount it on a side that didn't face the road, but it couldn't connect, I had to put it on the other side of the pool which is also closer to an outside access point to get it to connect to the network.Anything with wifi tends to suck up battery life if you use the 9v connecter.

Used as a coordinator node in a greenhouse project with wireless nodes for horticulture. It keeps my internal nodes communicated through radio frequency modules and the wifi chip is used for communication with the router and sending information through the Ubidots platform. It should be clear some basics concepts to implement them in communication with IoT platforms.

I gave this item 4-star just because the wifi driver was not easy to install, but it does perform really good. After a few articles and other readings, the driver was installed and the board performs really good.

connect to wifi and works as expected. 10/10

Since hooking this up, flashing the firmware to 1.3.0, and programming this I have had nothing but trouble with this board. WiFi has trouble connecting and once it does drops repeatedly. I even have recovery code that tries to reconnect when connections drop, but because connecting is a problem this doesn't work that well. Setting my APs to support even basic settings didn't help. Setting all the config up front (local IP, DNS, gateway, subnet) didn't work. I wish I had just stuck to the rock solid ethernet shield.