Introduction: Arduino Wifi Redback

By Arduino Hacks
About: I am an electrical engineer and an Arduino and electronics enthusiasts. I believe working with electricity should be fun as well as beneficial to engineers and the world at large. Twitter handle: @arduinohack…

Adding wireless capabilities to a project normally entails attaching other boards onto your arduino, which increases the size of your gadget. This has been a headache to many hardware developers for a long time. However, now you can all sigh in relief, because the arduino wifi redback has come to the rescue.

The arduino redback is a small board that incorporates a wifi module and an arduino nano. It is double sided. One side has the wifi module and the other has the arduino nano.

Step 1: Parts of the Redback

  • reset button – for resetting the board
  • I/O LED – a green LED that lights up to indicate digital input and output on wifi module
  • WiFi LED – a green LED that lights up to indicate that the wifi module is connected to a router or hotspot
  • Power LED – a red LED that lights up when the board is powered up
  • WiFi module – gives the board wireless capabilities

Step 2: Programing the Redback

The redback has no USB port. Therefore, you have to use an FT232RL breakout board to program it. When connecting the USB breakout to the redback it is important to ensure you match the pins as shown below

Redback—USB breakout
DTR——–>DTR

TXO——–>RXI

RXI———>TXO

VCC——–>3V3

GND——–>CTS

GND——->GND

Step 3: Library

Before, proceeding to write code, you have to download the wifi redback library. You can get it from here.

Extract and rename the library then copy it to the arduino libraries folder as described here.

After doing that, you can upload some of the examples and see what they do. For more information on the arduino wifi redback go to this page.