Troubleshooting XBee communications problem

NETMF & Gadgeteer
1

I have a FEZ Mini with an XBee that is supposed to transmit a string every second. I know the program is running an LED displaying information is updating as expected and the xbee is supposed to transmit what is on the display (8 characters).

I have a FEZ Panda II with an XBee that is supposed to receive the string sent by the FEZ Mini.

The problem is that my DataReceived event is not firing on the Panda II. So, what is the best way to debug this when I am not sure any one piece is working correctly?

Assuming all the hardware is good (and it is all brand new so hopefully that is a safe assumption), the problems could be:
Transmitting XBee wiring
Receiving XBee wiring
XBee Transmit code
XBee Receive code

2

See the xbee page for configuring your xbee modules:

3

Please correct me if I am not understanding this correctly, but it looks like the only thing that is being done in those instructions is to set the baud rate and to change the PAN ID. If that is the case, shouldn’t the XBee’s be able to be used out of the box with their default settings?

Is there a straightforward way of configuring the XBee from NETMF code? If I end up with a lot of these it would be really nice to have the code do all the configuration work (at least setting the PAN) instead of having to connect them to a PC and do them one by one.

4

As you suspect, XBee usually works out of the box if you can live with the preconfigured baud rate and ID. I am currently using one with a Panda II and have not modified its configuration in any way.

If you don’t have already, I’d recommend that you get something like this: [url]http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8687[/url] so that you can connect one of the modules to your PC and use a terminal program to emulate each side of the communications path.

5

DavidQMora, thanks for the recommendation, I bought 2 from Amazon and got them already.

Robert Jacobs, I set the baud and the PAN and it all started working, thanks. I was hoping to avoid that, but if I get to a point where I am needed so many of them that it’s a problem I’ll be making so much money I can afford to solve the problem.

6

The modules have a default baudrate set to 9600 and a pan id (don’t remember the value). So XBee work out of the box.

7

The trick is that there is a unique ID for every Xbee. To make two xbees “talk” to eachother they need to know who they are talking too.

If I remember right it should be possible using so called AT commands.

Glad you got it working. Sorry I could not respond earlier. If you need more help let us know :slight_smile: