A new,easy to use, RF Mesh Engine.
A contractor/customer wanted his mailbox monitored (200 yards away), his outdoor shed door monitored (100 yards away) and his garage door. All mesh nodes required batteries for operation.
We looked at XBee but found a much better solution by going with Synapse wireless. The RF engines / modules by Panasonic, California Eastern Labs, Synapse RF and the new low powered, high speed RF engine by Atmel, which makes the AVR for the Arudino, is the cat's meow of mesh wireless. All the RF engines are hardware pin and software compatible by the built-in Python language embedded into each RF engine. Over the air programming and troubleshooting is a "SNAP" using the Synapse Portal development and deployment software. The RF engines will last for years, if programmed right, on 2 AA batteries.
Connecting the RF Engine to an Arduino is easy by the 3.3 VDC GPIO pins. (RF GPIO output to Arduino input - 3.3 VDC input is a high). A 3.3 VDC level converted is necessary in the other direction. (Sparkfun)
You got any more info on what you did/how you did it?
A blog perhaps?
Mowcius