I am trying to create a simple setup that is designed to periodically sample the temperature using an LM35 sensor. With the transmitting unit the sensor is wired up to the analog pin 0. The xbee is wired up to the arduino digital pins 0 and 1. The crux of the sketch is as follows:
void loop() {
float temperature = getTemperature( temperaturePin ); // func to read the temp
Serial.println( temperature ); //printing the result
delay(1000); //waiting a second
}
I have 2 term windows open, 1 for the transmitting arduino/xbee and 1 for the receiving xbee/usb explorer board. The window for the transmitting arduino/xbee shows the temp but nothing shows up in the receiving window. If I interactively type in the transmitting window the results show up in the receiving one. I have been perusing various examples of how to make this work (for example: http://tronixstuff.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/moving-forward-with-arduino-–-chapter-14-xbee-introduction/#comment-8172) but I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong.
A couple of questions to help the folks here understand what you've got setup.
Which series of XBees, series 1 or series 2.
How do you have them configured? and, how did you configure them? Did you use XCTU or AT commands?
What did you configure them to?
When you say that you have the XBee hooked to pins 0 and 1 on the arduino which pins from the XBee, one of the often done mistakes is to get the connections backwards.
Things like, did you use the three volt arduino pin to power them or the 5V, are you using an adapter board, shield or just wires?
They are series 2 and they were configured with XCTU with one being the coordinator AT and the other being a router AT. I am pretty sure that the 0 and 1 pins are configured correctly. I can communicate between the 2 using the 2 term sessions. They are plugged into the 3.3V power source and the temperature sensor is plugged into the 5V. And the xbee modules are connected just using wires and not a shield. I have a xbee shield but I do not have the sockets that have to be soldered in to allow it to plug into the arudino board.
Curious, it sounds like you are doing everything right. Is it possible that, since you have the XBee and the terminal window for the temp transmitter hooked up at the same time something is preventing the XBee from seeing the serial out from the arduino? Pins 0 and 1 on the arduino are also the pins that talk to the terminal window. In my experimentation, I shy away from using pins 0,1 for XBees because of this. Also, Tx on the arduino needs to be hooked to Rx on the XBee and similarly on the other two pins. One thing you can try is to somehow power the transmitting Arduino with something other than your USB port. That will remove a possible conflict since the USB port will be gone. This problem sounds exactly like you have the Rx and TX on the XBee backwards. If I had a nickel for every time I did that.....
I know you set the baud rate on the XBee to be the same as the arduino, right? One mistake I made a few times was to set the XBee baud rate correctly then forget to write it. Then, when I plugged it in again, the rate had reverted to the default 9600 and nothing worked.
If you want to move the transmitting XBee to a different set of pins to free up the serial pins for testing things, look at NewSoftSerial, and use version 10C. IIRC that is the one that is on the arduino playground. You can also google it and find the blog where the author posts updates. I use this so I can watch what is going on without affecting the data stream. Using this you can have 0,1 for normal serial and 2,3 for XBee transmit receive.
What you're doing is exactly the way I test a new XBee, except I just println("Hello"); every half second using NewSoftSerial and pins 2,3.