They play together harmlessly - good question!
You gotta love Nordic Semi - they've got all sorts of great docs. I just skimmed this one:
http://www.nordicsemi.no/files/Product/ ... RF24XX.pdf
It talks about how to implement a frequency hopping scheme - quite cool.
I have SMiRFs operating all the time roughly 5 feet from the wireless router (dual antenna cheapo from CompUSA). There are many safe guards from interferance:
It was awhile ago when I read how 802.11 and Bluetooth work, but they basically hope channels all the time. So they will be in and out of your channel very quickly. The SMiRF automatically re-transmits if the listening unit does not respond. It's highly unlikely that you'll get jammed for the amount of time to transmit the packet 30 times. 802.11 will be in and gone by the time you get four or five packets into the air.
The SMiRF is setup to listen for very specialized packets that do not look like 802.11 packets. What I mean is the SMiRF must get a correct CRC, a correct Address, and then a correct address in packet location 0. It's highly unlikely the SMiRF will get any of that from a random network packet. The SMiRF uses 16bit CRC - I believe 802.11 is much higher, hence, they really shouldn't have similar looking packets.
BUT - the SMiRF does pickup a random packet every couple minutes. If you watch the Status LED, it will blink every so often (minutes) in a noisy environment. That means it received a packet that passed the CRC and address check. But the packet did not pass the location 0 test so the SMiRF does not do anything with it - just blinks the LED.
What I really want is a guru to figure out how to tap into the 802.11 network with a SMiRF. Wireless device anyone?
-Nathan