Final Project - debugging wireless
Spent a frustrating evening trying to get the Zigbee radios to work.
Update: There is a further solution to the problems described in this article. Basically, always send a "wakeup" character to the Zigbee before doing anything else, and set the guard time before a "+++" command to 1100 msec, not 1000.
The problem:
On one of my prototype boards, the Zigbee radio did not seem to be receiving commands from the Arduino, so it wasn't getting the right network ID, or setting itself to transmit in broadcast mode.
I programmed the Zigbee on my "modem" board, which connects it directly to a USB adapter, but nothing doing. It was clearly receiving via wireless, and ouputing the received signal to the Arduino, which changed the display, but nothing coming back the other way.
I spent several hours trying different things, including an incorrectly connected 12V power supply which killed one of the AD5206 digital pots, and nearly killed an Arduino mini.
I had made a mistake, in that I had not set the Zigbees correctly to multicast by using the PAN ID FFFF. I had used FF instead. However, that did not fix everything - one Zigbee still did not work.
What turned out to be problem? One of the Zigbees is defective, probably as a result of bad soldering by myself. It works fine as a "modem", but simply refuses to accept input from the Arduino mini. Two other Zigbee radios are working fine.
I uploaded the receive protocol software to two of the working prototype boards, and tried sending various lighting commands to them, which worked fine.
Of course, now I am behind: I still need to port over the sensor code & the state machine from the midterm, and physically assemble the lamps.