Adafruit CC3000 WiFi Shield with Onboard Antenna

For years we've seen all sorts of microcontroller-friendly WiFi
modules but none of them were really Adafruit-worthy. Either they were
too slow, or too difficult to use, or required signing an NDA, or
had
limited functionality, or too expensive, or too large. So we shied
away from creating or developing a WiFi Arduino shield.

NO LONGER!

The CC3000 hits that sweet spot of usability, price and capability.
It uses SPI for communication (not UART!) so you can push data as fast
as you want or as slow as you want. It has a proper interrupt system
with IRQ pin so you can have asynchronous connections. It supports
802.11b/g, open/WEP/WPA/WPA2 security, TKIP & AES. A built in TCP/IP
stack with a "BSD socket" interface. TCP and UDP in both client and
server mode, up to 4 concurrent sockets. It does not support "AP"
mode, it can connect to an access point but it cannot be an access
point.

We carefully wrapped this little silver module into an Arduino
shield. We also added a microSD socket and a reset button. It has an
onboard 3.3V regulator that can handle the 350mA peak current, and a
level shifter to allow 3 or 5V logic level. The antenna layout is
identical to TI's suggested layout and we're using the same
components, trace arrangement, and antenna so the board maintains its
FCC emitter compliance (you'll still need to perform FCC validation
for a finished product, but the WiFi part is taken care of). Even
though it's got an onboard antenna we were pretty surprised at the
range, as good as a smartphone's.

Each order comes with one fully assembled and tested shield, some
male header for attaching it to an Arduino and a 2x3 female header
that you can use to plug it into the ICSP port of a Mega. We don't
have a detailed tutorial yet but to get you started, we've got a fully
working Arduino library that is based off of TI's codebase but adapted
for use with the AVR. We also have example code showing how to scan
the SSID's, connect to your access point and run DHCP, do a DNS lookup
to IP address, ping a site and connect to a remote TCP socket such as
a website and print out the page.

Please note the hardware is good, but the library code does not yet
support all of the CC3000's functionality. SSID scanning, connection,
DHCP, DNS lookup, ping, and UDP/TCP client connections (eg connect to
a website and grab data) all work and are tested with example code.
UDP/TCP server connections are not supported yet! Check out our
tutorial for wiring and Arduino library downloads [1]

For use with Arduino Uno, Leonardo/Micro & Mega only at this time -
we'll try to get the code ported to the Due at some point but no ETA.

Links:
------
[1] http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-cc3000-wifi

Key specifications

Item number
5998543

General information

Manufacturer
Category
Electronics modules
Manufacturer no.
ada-1491
Release date
11/22/2016

Package dimensions

Weight
10 g