Greetings.
I'm designing a board which includes an Arduino Nano and an XBee. I have jumpers to disconnect their TX/RX connection in order to upload sketches to the Nano. Is this necessary?
Also, it just occurred to me that when the two are connected, I may not be able to watch the sketch run via serial monitor on my computer with a usb cable. Is that correct?
Thanks much,
Mark M.
1st part - nothing wrong with that, keeps xbee from interfering on the RX line when it sees stuff coming out on the TX line.
2nd part - '328P only has 1 hardware serial port. You can connect a USB cable, may see your Tx output on the serial monitor, any Rx you provide from the serial monitor may or may not interfere with Rx coming from the Xbee,
However, as you're using a Nano and have to make some kind of connection to the xbee that involves 5V to 3.3V level conversion anyway, you may want to consider either using Software serial in on other pins to talk to the xbee, or adding an SPI/I2C interface UART chip to talk with the Xbee, and thus keep D0/D1 free for USB comm's.
Could I use software serial to communicate with the xbee in both directions? The amount of data involved is minimal so I don't think speed would be an issue. This seems like a fine idea and an easy mod to my board.
I'm replicating the Ladyada xbee carrier on my board. I've used it before with a similar board I built using an Arduino Mega, which had multiple TX/RX lines. Would I be simply dedicating two digital I/O pins and hardwiring them to the TX/RX of the XBee carrier? Isn't that stuff all 5V?
Thanks much,
Mark
Yes, to the first part.
As far as being all 5V, I don't believe so, things like this make 3.3V for power and this one appears to have resistors for voltage dividers too.
http://www.robotshop.com/en/droids-xbee-simple-board.html
OK I'll see how it goes. I have space and break-out pads and a small breadboard area on the board that will make it easy enough to play around and see what works. Thanks a bunch.
-Mark