Hello Everyone,
I was wondering if someone would be able to guide of what do I need and how to do the following:
I want to bridge (transmit) serial (RS232) communication using a few xbees connected to different devices to ONE xbee coordinator that is attached to an embeddedARM (Linux) computer.
Any idea?
Thank you!
Are you looking for bi-directional communication, or is one-way sufficient?
If one-way is sufficient, any number of series 1 XBees can talk to a single XBee connected to the PC.
If bi-directional communication is required, you will need series 2/2.5 XBees that can form a mesh network. One of them will be a coordinator (the one at the PC makes the most sense) while the others are end devices.
Thanks for the response Paul,
So I do need bi-directional.
What I am confused about is how would I recognize that two different devices are communicating with the one on the Linux machine.
Another thing is: what exactly do I need to connect the end xbees to an RS232 / RS485 ports and just transmit the information as is.
Thank you.
What I am confused about is how would I recognize that two different devices are communicating with the one on the Linux machine.
That's done with coding on each end-device. Either there is a different sketch for each end-device, with a hard-coded ID associated with each packet, or the ID is stored by a unique sketch in EEPROM, and the same sketch runs on each end-device, including the ID read from EEPROM in each packet.
what exactly do I need to connect the end xbees to an RS232 / RS485 ports and just transmit the information as is.
What is it you are connecting the XBees to that has RS232 and/or RS485 ports? The Arduino doesn't have them.
The coordinator is the "master" in a series 2 network and the router or end devices send/ relay their transmissions to the coordinator if configured to do so. So you "only" need series 2 xbees, configure one as coordinator and the others as routers/ end devices. Then connect them to the rs232 sources (maybe you have to do level shifting). That's all.
Look into the datasheet, there is much information about configuring the devices.
If you want to dig deeper into XBees there is a great book "Building Wireless Sensor Networks". I'm just blogging the content, if you are interested about my experiences: http://lookmanowire.blogspot.com