It will have some kind of meaningless behavior, e.g. measuring photocell every 5 seconds. Versus measuring flex sensor every 5 seconds. I want to see how different kinds of sensor readings, and different patterns of radio communication (AT over XBee) will affect battery life. All data will be dummy data. I will make at at least 10 such experiments.
I currently don't know of any clever way of debugging! I write my code carefully and I watch the behavior of the radio communication, if any unexpected behavior then I read my code 5 times over again. As I said, I am really new to this! But if there is a way of having the Arduino write live debugging information to a PC, I guess that is what I need!!
Side note: I can't use the XBee transmissions as heartbeat since I also want to measure battery life for some sketches that have the XBee sleeping forver or even not attached.
I don't know if this Arduino can measure battery voltage. If it can, then I still want to implement the heart beat part first, and perhaps play with battery voltage measurements at a later point. Right now, I am just looking for the easiest way of transmitting heartbeats, just any kind of signal that it is still running, to a PC.
Sorry, but I don't understand your 'abuse' question?
Thanks, Velle