Programming the Arduino Wirelessly

I was wondering if there was a way to have the arduino wirelessly connect to a pc's usb so that the entire connection (including the programming of the arduino) was wireless. For example, I have an arduino mini, so between it and the mini usb adapter I'd like to insert RF links so that these two modules don't have to be physically connected.
For a quick experiment, I tried using parallax's 433 MHz transceiver package:

and basically connected a tx/rx pair of rf links in place of a wire. Unfortunately, I received an error saying the IDE was expecting a response of 0x14 instead of 0x00.
I thought I may have seen something similar done already, but I was unable to come up with a result using the forum search. Any help is appreciated!

I think that an xbee module can be a solution "ready to use" for you. check out the xbee shield (or your own board wired like that)

From what I could tell, an Arduino with an Xbee shield is still programmed through a USB/serial cable and then you switch a jumper to communicate between Xbee shielded Arduinos. I was looking more towards a 1 Arduino setup without the need to switch between a wired and a wireless setup to program the Arduino. However, I might go ahead and get a couple Xbee's anyway since the documentation is already there. Thanks for your help!

We've done something similiar at work. We've got an atmega8 with a xbee connected to the uart. The atmega8 is loaded with a bootloader (similiar to arduino bootloader) and we could program it from the a remote station (ie. pc connected to xbee module).

So, you should be able to connect a xbee to the rx/tx pins (with required level conversion circuit) of your arduino and program it from another one.

program arduino wirelessly - Google Search

:slight_smile:

Just as an update, I got some XBee modules and tried them out. They work great. I should have gone with them in the first place. Thanks for the help.