I'm trying to build a (soft) real-time application that has mild throughput requirements. It's going to be a little while until I receive my first ESP8266-12 in the mail for testing, so I was hoping I could see if I could figure out ahead-of-time if the ESP8266 fits my needs.
My plan was to fill use the ADC pin to sample a signal at 8000kHz (at the very least) and save it all into a buffer. Then the ESP8266 would send the data in the buffer once it's full. So, for example, the device would take 8000 samples in 1 second (all of them should fit in memory), send all the data in the buffer out, and then start sampling again. If we assume the samples take 32 bits, then can the ESP8266-12 achieve wifi TX throughput of 256kbps (or 32KB/s)? Moreover, I'd really like to program everything through the Arduino, if possible.
Obviously, if I can achieve this with TCP, then I'd be more than happy. This thread makes it look like it's very easily achievable (you may need to scroll down to see the netio results). This thread also suggests that it should easily be possible (although it seems to only report the most optimistic measurements). However, [url=http://zonerobotics.com/wordpress/?p=456]this page[/ur] suggests it's no where even near possible. So then which throughput numbers should I use?
I'd probably be fine using UDP or raw sockets (both offered by the most recent sdk), if that could give me the wifi throughput I need. I haven't found any numbers regarding these (except for the very poor UDP performance above). Any help would be greatly appreciated! If I could do this project on a $5-7 low(er)-energy microcontroller with a cheap little analog sensor, I'd be beyond happy. Other popular MCUs like the RN-171 or CC3000 of course give much better performance (and possibly even power consumption), but cost $25+.