Xbee Serial Link

Resources

• The following notes borrow heavily from Tom Igoe's, "Making Things Talk."
• The notes also include info from Rob Faludi's notes
• For pin mapping, and more than you ever wanted to know: XBee product manual
• To set up a PAN id at ITP: please visit the ITP PAN ID page

Overview

This tutorial will show you how to link two microcontrollers to each other wirelessly using two XBee series 1 radios. To get started with XBee radios, see the XbeeBasics tutorial

Here's what you'll be doing:

Parts

For this lab you will need to have the following parts:

• Two SERIES 1 XBee or Xbee Pro radios mounted on breakout boards
• Wire
• one LED
• one switch
• one 10K resistors
• Two Arduinos
• A USB-to mini cable (to plug from your computer to the USB-to-serial adaptor)
• You;;; also need a USB-to-serial adaptor, such as the the Sparkfun Xbee Explorer, the New Micros Xbee dongle (more expensive), or Adafruit models which give you direct access to the serial and programming pins on the XBee unit without a breadboard.

Configure the radios

Connect an XBee to your personal computer via USB as shown in the XbeeBasics lab, and configure your radios as follows

AT COMMANDS
RADIO 1	Radio 2
+++	+++
ATMY 1	ATMY 2
ATDL 2	ATDL 1
ATID 0101 (replace with your PANID)	ATID 0101 (replace with your PANID)

Next, connect the switch to a digital input of one of your Arduinos as shown in the lab, like so: