XBee has a brain fart?

XBee projects like the adapter, xBee tutorials, tweetawatt/wattcher, etc. from Adafruit

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substatica
 
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XBee has a brain fart?

Post by substatica »

Rigged a quick XBee relay setup. Transmitting XBee with a digital input button, receiving XBee with a transistor and 3.3 volt relay off the pin that goes high from the transmitting XBee's button.

Everything works as hoped/expected, yet if I hit the button 20(ish) times the transmitting XBee's LED stops flashing regularly, it flashes dimly when I depress the button, but it doesn't seem to send. Then after 10 seconds or so, it's as if it tries to catch up and send what it hasn't. Any ideas? After this 10-20 seconds everything goes back to working for a while then the same thing happens. Cheers!

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: XBee has a brain fart?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

Hmm. Sounds almost like a power problem. How are you powering the transmitter?

substatica
 
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Re: XBee has a brain fart?

Post by substatica »

The transmitter is powered with 2x D batteries, the receiver with 2x AA batteries. I was wondering about power, but why would it go back to normal if it's draining the batteries?

substatica
 
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Re: XBee has a brain fart?

Post by substatica »

Thanks for the response. I've attached a rudimentary circuit diagram. Based on the Digi relay example. Used an LED for a diode. The relay is 3.3v.
Attachments
Simple XBee Wireless Relay
Simple XBee Wireless Relay
xbee_relay.PNG (15.5 KiB) Viewed 966 times
Last edited by substatica on Sun Apr 14, 2013 8:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: XBee has a brain fart?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

Alkaline batteries do tend to 'recover' somewhat after a rest. When almost drained, they will have a burst of energy when first turned on then the voltage will start to sag. But D cells should be able to handle that load if they are relatively fresh.

substatica
 
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Re: XBee has a brain fart?

Post by substatica »

Is there flow control or baud rate that comes into play with simple DI/O? Do I have to turn off some functions?

substatica
 
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Re: XBee has a brain fart?

Post by substatica »

I swapped the 2x D battery pack with another 2x AA and it seems to have alleviated the issue, something with the exact voltage affecting timing? I also changed some settings on both XBees, but the issue persisted after those changes so I don't think the solution was that, but I'll mention them for completeness,

Set RR(MAC retries)=0
AP(API mode)=0
BD(baud rate)=7 (115200)
RO(Packetization Timeout)=0

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: XBee has a brain fart?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

You might try running this by the folks over at the Digi forum: forums.digi.com/
They know the insides of these modules better than we do.

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Re: XBee has a brain fart?

Post by substatica »

No need, now that both XBee's are running off of 2x AA's the problem doesn't happen. Solved -- forever!

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