xbee for arduino wireless programming

[intellijel]

they were both series 1 and had the same firmware.

I have found other people who experienced the same problem.

[adafruit]

sorry, i only stock and support plain xbee series 1's. i dont even own a set of pros!

[karlgg]

The pros are higher power, so maybe they cause a power drop in your circuit? That's the only thing I can think of that might be seriously different.

Unless you used 900Mhz Pros, and they had interference that the 2.4Ghz doesn't.

[foozinator]

i dont know anyone who thinks the series 2 is better than series 1
unless you need a mesh network. and thats very uncommon

I'm looking at hardware for a home automation project, and this is the root of the series 1 vs series 2/2.5/ZB issue for me. If I plan on having nodes throughout the house (and in the garden and down the driveway), won't I need mesh networking to reach all of them? As far as I've seen, the only higher power XBee's (2mw +) available to buy are all series 2 or later.

If I could just get a set of higher power XBees as series 1 and still get all of them to reach the central server, I'd be happy. Otherwise, why program repeaters with store-and-forward if you can get the same functionality with off-the-shelf stuff?

Over-the-air programmablility is also desirable, and it sounds like API-mode would allow setting a remote XBee pins as well as addressing multiple nodes (for the central server, at least) to accomplish the hardware reset. Has anyone tried to change a bootloader to make a soft reset (using the WDT or something) ?

I'm comfortable with software, but this hardware stuff is all new to me.

[blalor]

I'm looking at hardware for a home automation project, and this is the root of the series 1 vs series 2/2.5/ZB issue for me. If I plan on having nodes throughout the house (and in the garden and down the driveway), won't I need mesh networking to reach all of them? As far as I've seen, the only higher power XBee's (2mw +) available to buy are all series 2 or later.

POWEEEEEER!!! (as Jeremy Clarkson would say) only takes you so far. What happens when the most powerful modules still don't reach? I think that's the major utility of the ZigBee mesh network capability. I bought a Digi ConnectPort X4 ZigBee starter kit for the Digi wireless design contest; even if you don't enter the contest, $150 gets you a ZigBee/Ethernet gateway configured as the coordinator; a XBee ZB (series 2) Pro OEM module with a USB dev board (which uses the same FTDI driver as the USB-Serial cable sold by adafruit); a wall-powered router with a temperature (and light?) sensor; and a battery-powered light and temperature sensor. It's quite a bit of kit for $150. The gateway runs Python and is a pretty nice environment for communicating with your wireless nodes. I have a setup with one node connected to an Arduino which reads the state of the heating zones for my furnace as well as 6 temperature sensors on a 1-Wire network, and another node which monitors current draw at my electric panel. I'm using Digi's Dia framework to feed the samples from those nodes to a hosted server that collects and analyzes the data. I started going down the route that Limor did of hacking an Asus WL-520gu to act as the gateway, but that kept locking up on me. I needed to get the Digi hardware to enter the contest, and it's proved to do the job nicely for me.

Apropos to this thread, I haven't tried reprogramming my Arduinos via these Series 2 XBees, but I had such lousy luck with the Series 1 devices that I've just given up.

[TedTheBellhop]

Hello and thanks for the nice tutorial.

Everything works fine for me - even wrote a nice GUI to scan for nodes and upload sketches remotely.
The only problem is that I have many XBees Series 2, so I can't reset the destination nodes remotely.

The XB24-ZB Firmware doesn't support Digital IO Line Passing, so I can't utilize it to reset the destination node.
Does anyone have an idea of an alternative way to trigger a reset?

[foozinator]

Does anyone have an idea of an alternative way to trigger a reset?

I've heard about wiring up an output pin through a transistor to the reset pin, but I'm not sure if this would work at the end of the upload.

Personally, I would like to find a way for the Arduino to fire off the bootloader itself (in code), and reset via watchdog or something. This is mainly because I'm looking at cheaper radios that don't have GPIO pins. Anyone know if this is possible?

[us7892]

...and another node which monitors current draw at my electric panel.

How did you do this? Do you have some build instructions on the current loop, and what you did to get the wireless node chirping the power usage at the panel?

I'm working on this same sort of thing, and it is slow going so far.

Thanks

[blalor]

...and another node which monitors current draw at my electric panel.

How did you do this? Do you have some build instructions on the current loop, and what you did to get the wireless node chirping the power usage at the panel?

I was inspired by this project: Real-time Web Based Power Charting. I used similar off-the-shelf current clamps. I haven't done a write-up of my own, yet.

[Johan Adler]

I will shamefully have to admit that I have neither searched the forums for a solution, nor even read all posts in this thread. Major forum no-no, but my 5-year old son really has to get to bed, and honestly so do I.

I have tried to get remote programming of Arduino working on several occasions usin your instructions, but your info is based on older modules and I have newer ZB/2.5 modules, so a lot of the settings are different, with different AT commands, or simply settings that you use that no longer exist in current day modules.

Your stuff is hard to find here in Sweden, so my Xbee modules are connected using SparkFuns "regulated Xbee adapter/breakout board" that has a solder bridge between DIO3 and RTS (do not ask me why), and DIO3 wired to the pin next to Dout where the usual FTDI-style Arduino adapters usually have DTR for autoreset.

I have tried to enter all the settings recommended at http://www.ladyada.net/make/xbee/arduino.html, and I have tried with D3 connected to RTS or to DTR, no success yet. Basic transparent communication has never been a problem, but now I am working on a project that will end up in my neighbors car, logging temperature to see the effect of the heater mounted inside the car that my project controls with a relay. I think that I can get the logging working, storing all data on my server. But it would be really neat to be able to reprogram the Arduino while it is still in his car, to optimize the different delays and make it accomplish a pleasant temperature inside the car now during the winter.

Any clues?

[gallamine]

This is semi-related, but I'm trying to do this wireless programming business while using an XbeeShield on my target device. I noticed that on the sheild the CTS/DIO7 line from the Xbee is connected via a transistor to the Arduino reset line. So, can I change the steps in this tutorial and instead of using DIO3, use DIO7 to control the reset?
Has anyone gotten the wireless programming working using the XbeeShield and the Dueminalove?