i am considering building a small project consisting of a cluster of 5/10 arduinos, plugged on devices far from less than 10 meters from each others. they collect data from sensors, and one of them will be responsible to send it away to a server with gsm.
i plan to use xbee modules for the sensors-arduinos, and a xbee shield AND a gsm shield on the "master" arduino.
how good sound this solution? i don't want to dive into it (specially the gsm module which is expensive) if i have no chance to success.
could i avoid the soldering step for using an xbee shield with a gsm shield? (i.E can shields be on top of each others in any way?)
how hard will it be to deal with the serial port with the xbee network and the gsm network?
could i avoid the soldering step for using an xbee shield with a gsm shield? (i.E can shields be on top of each others in any way?)
In general, some shields can co-exist. Some can't.
Links to specific shields will produce specific answers.
However, keep in mind that both the XBee and the GSM module are radios, so they need antennas to work correctly. You'll need to make sure that the antennas physically do no clash, too.
how hard will it be to deal with the serial port with the xbee network and the gsm network?
You are not going to connect both of them to the serial port. Only one of them can use the serial port. The other may be able to use a software serial port, or, if using a Mega as the controller, each can connect to a different hardware serial port.
The XBees with shields, when properly configured, simply replace wired serial connections, so the Serial class is trivial to use with XBees. It works exactly the same as it would with wires instead of XBees.