wireless programming thing
Yea - nothing like being clueless AND doing some off-the-wall task that few have done.
I'm pretty sure it's one of the XBees. I reset both of them to factory defaults as you suggested and I could light up the RSSI on the receiver with the PC side transmitter when I did a X-CTU loop back test. That suggested to me the receiver was getting the ping. But when I swapped them and I could not get the receiver RSSI light. I still don't know if it's a receive or transmit problem and maybe there is no way to tell.
Anyhow, I ordered two additional XBees this morning from Adafruit. I live in NY State so hope to get them tomorrow. Right.
You mentioned abuse and it's possible I did damage one of them. I have my project bot inside a 13" hamster ball (more like a ferret ball) and it does crash into things. It's possible I broke it before I even got it powered up. I'm thinking of shock mounting the new one. Because it's relatively inaccessible I want to be able to program it and watch sensor data as it runs. Probably not entirely necessary, but certainly more fun.