Xbee capabilities

Projects General Guidance
1

Has anyone worked with the the 2.4GHz xbee? I want to use it for a project but I don't exactly know how they work or what you can do with them. So here is my real questions:

  1. The 2.4GHz version shows 4-5 I/O ports, so does that mean what ever signal i put into the port will come out the other end of the linked Xbee?
  2. What data can I send? Does it have to be binary? Does the arduino translate the data for me?
  3. How does it all work?

Thanks!

2

magruder13:
Has anyone worked with the the 2.4GHz xbee?

No. I haven't.

magruder13:

  1. The 2.4GHz version shows 4-5 I/O ports, so does that mean what ever signal i put into the port will come out the other end of the linked Xbee?

I believe the I/O ports need some polling on the XBee. There's a good tutorial about using the digital and analog IOs on XBees in ladyada's website

magruder13:
2. What data can I send? Does it have to be binary? Does the arduino translate the data for me?

Whatever you send in the specified bitrate, arrives on the other end and the specified bitrate. You won't have to hire a translator.

magruder13:
3. How does it all work?

It just works. (Had to say this.)
Normally you configure it, and it can work just as if it was a wire connected to another XBee. There's also plenty of tutorials about using them available online.

3

If you are really into XBees there is a fantastic book which covers a lot of applications for XBees. It's "Building Wireless Sensor Networks" by Robert Faludi (O'Reilly).
I'm reading it and working through it at the moment accompanying the book with a blog (http://lookmanowire.blogspot.com/).
The XBee has 10 digital I/O ports (4 can be configured as analog inputs) and there is a lot possible with them and of course transmitting data between XBees and Arduino. If you describe your planned project in detail maybe I could help you with further information.

markbee

4

bubulindo:

magruder13:
3. How does it all work?

It just works. (Had to say this.)

And that isn't very far from the truth! The Faludi book is good, it got me going in a hurry. XBees have two basic operating modes, "AT" or "Transparent" mode being one, and "API" mode being the other. Using transparent mode, you configure one XBee to talk to another, and basically what goes in the one end comes out the other. Think of it as a wireless modem. API mode, on the other hand, is much more flexible and allows use of all the features of the XBee. There are two flavors of API mode, AP=2 uses escape characters so there is no worry about binary values in the data payload being confused with packet control characters. Frankly, I don't know why the non-escaped mode (AP=1) even exists.

I tried AT mode once or twice just to convince myself the things worked, but moved to API mode with AP=2 and haven't looked back. Get Andrew Rapp's library (which requires API mode, AP=2), it works really well for me. For a simple two-node network using Andrew Rapp's library, see my blog post.