I am setting up one way communication between an Arduino+XBee and another XBee module. I simply need to send a heartbeat from the XBee to the Arduino+XBee. Does anyone know if I can program the XBee directly to send a heartbeat? Or will it need an Arduino to control it also?
I don't know, but what's the heartbeat for?
If you get Xbee to do it then that tells you nothing about the Arduino.
Also a little more descriptive title (you can change that) may get you some more informed responses.
Rob
I'm guessing about your purpose here, but you can have the xbee go to sleep for a programmable period of time, wake up, and send something. This is how temperature sensors and such work. It's part of their normal operation; look at the datasheet under the sleep topic.
Apologies for the original crappy title "Arduino".
Essentially what I am doing is I have 1 arduino + XBee at a base station. I want to see if a remote sensor is powered on. That's it - VERY simple. My thoughts were to simply have another XBee at the remote station that sends a heartbeat every second that tells the base station "I'm here and all is well". It sounds like the XBee can do this without the need of a dedicated Arduino at the remote station?
Also - on the remote station can I tie Rx and Tx together? Then when I send something from the base station - it would 'echo' whatever I send? Or am I completely over simplifying things?
Thanks all!
It sounds like the XBee can do this without the need of a dedicated Arduino at the remote station?
True.
Also - on the remote station can I tie Rx and Tx together? Then when I send something from the base station - it would 'echo' whatever I send?
You could try it. However, XBees are pretty reliable at delivering what you send, so why you want to receive what you sent, instead of a reply escapes me.
My goal is as few components on the remote station as possible. I guess I need to get more information about the XBee - it sounds like I can write code on the XBee itself. Does anyone have a good reference for what I can do on the XBee? Maybe a tutorial? Perhaps the XBee is even a bit overkill for this particular application but they seem easy to use. The other problem is there may be more than one of these 'systems' around and it is important that a base+remote station are paired - I don't want responses from other stations to interfere with each other.
Sounds like the remote XBee would not need a microcontroller. Set up a digital I/O pin to sense the power that you're interested in, and configure the XBee to transmit every so often. Heartbeat and reading all rolled up in one. I wouldn't necessarily mess with sleep mode, unless the remote is powered by batteries so that it'd be needed for power conservation purposes. Even if so, I'd get it working first without sleep mode.
Every answer you ever wanted can be found here http://ftp1.digi.com/support/documentation/90000976_G.pdf. This is the actual guide to using and configuring them. In direct answer to your question, no, you cannot program the XBee, you configure it. There are a ton of options and possibilities. The easiest one is the one suggested by Jack, have it transmit a voltage periodically. However, this requires you go to API mode and that requires you program for receipt of packets to get to the data. Or, you can just notice that you got a packet and move on. Depends on what you really want to do with it.
Read through the document and you'll see why you get differing answers from different people. The possibilities with these little radios goes on forever.
Thanks for all the info all. Looks like I have a lot if reading to do!
Yes. And now even some more to read. Because there are in fact programmable XBees available:
markbee