Getting Started with Stalker v3.0 and XBee

Products & Technology Bee series & WSN
#1

Hello,
I am new to the task of building a wireless sensor network, and I have a few questions about transmitting data from a Seeeduino stalker v3 to my mac. Here is my current setup

  1. Seeeduino Stalker v3.0 with solar panel and battery
  2. UartSBee
  3. Sparkfun USB XBee explorer
  4. 2x XBee S1 Wi-fi modules.

I have been able to configure the XBees in the X-CTU program, but I am unable to achieve communication between the XBees when one is attached to the stalker board and the other to the PC. While the stalker is directly connected to the computer, I have been able to upload sketches that return battery voltage and charge status to the serial monitor, yet when I plug in the XBees and try to upload a sketch, all I get are “avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding” errors. I would like to be able to have those same battery numbers be transmitted over the wireless XBee network. I have read through many of the tutorials (ladyada and sparkfun) but I still feel like I am missing out on what code to use. Does anyone have any step-by-step tutorials for the stalker and wifi xbees, or simple example code that they would be willing to share? Thanks in advance.

#2

You said that you’re able to upload sketch which return the Battery Voltage.

My Suggestion:

Try to first upload sketch and then connect the Xbee over it. The code should stores the value of Battery Voltage in a variable of type Byte val; and then use Serial.write(val); which can serially transfer data to the XBee. Further, XBees should be configured in the same way to enable communication between them.

All the Best!
Tanmay Chaturvedi