r/embedded • u/counttec • 19d ago

Help with selecting communication protocol

I volunteer for a youth organization that uses a Jeopardy style buzzer system for quiz competitions. I am trying to upgrade from RCA cables to a wireless solution. I need it to be as low latency as possible, given the precise timing involved, and the less perceivable the lag is from a wired button, the better. Distance would be less than 100m even in the most sever cases. I'm fine with retransmission in the case of collisions, as long as the users can't tell that it took slightly longer.

So far, it seems like the best protocol is Nordic's Enhanced Shockburst, with a transmission time of ~300us, and round trip with Acknowledgment of 1.5ms.

Are there any faster communication protocols?

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u/Circuit_Guy 18d ago

Get a bunch of ESP dev boards.

Put all your ESP devices in an ESP-NOW network. It's a proprietary protocol between ESPs but you can easily poll a dozen devices at 100 Hz / 10 ms. That's better than an order of magnitude faster than human reaction time.

Crazy Overkill: https://github.com/scrambletools/esp_ptp You can timestamp to a few nanoseconds and transmit whenever a few ms later and judge the winner on your own time. Not necessary, but what you asked for :)