Xbees Communication Established

I set up the Xbee radios I have. One using the xbee explorer from sparkfun, one with the FT232RL on a sparkfun breakout board breadboarded to a xbee. And a third hooked up to a arduino. I went to chapter 6 in Making Things Talk and got through the setup. Really simple for this project. It uses AT commands to talk to the Xbee radios and set them up with IDs and destination addresses (the other radio's ID).

 

 

 

Making Things Talk has a terminal program in processing that makes sending commands to the xbee visible. Otherwise you are typing to a black screen in a terminal program like Putty, which is tough as you don't have the visual feedback until you get a OK reply after you type the command correctly. The Xbees don't print newlines between commands, only a return character, so the processing termial prints on screen and replaces the return character with a newline so it isn't typing over it's previous response.

I did a cut and paste of the code for the setups from the makingthingstalk.com blog, I don't have a lot of time to type the code in like I originally planned on doing. The radios are really cool. I can't wait to hook them up to something "useful".