Wednesday, March 9, 2011

First XBee running

Spent most of the day rebuilding the power monitor in the garage and interfacing it to an XBee.  I had forgotten how I built the monitor so I had to create the schematic by reverse engineering then take it apart and rebuild it.  This time I'm keeping the schematic!.  Anyway, I learned a lot more about the XBee module that I haven't seen online in one place.  I'll record as much of what I found out as I can remember for the next person that has to overcome some of the same problems.

Anyway, the power monitor is serving the power levels on both wifi and XBee.  I plan on modifying the code in the satellite clock to serve the levels on wifi and forward them to Pachube so I can take the broken wifi adapter out of the power display and get the data I need from the satellite clock for display.  This is a serious redo of the architecture I originally envisioned, but what the heck.  I'll have to serve the time and power levels over the XBee network and I haven't quite decided how I want to do that yet.

However, there's nothing to prevent me from using the XBees just like small web servers and allow them to be interrogated by the coordinator radio.  The coordinator can simply poll each XBee for data and then hold it for an internet request.  This doesn't have to be too hard to get working.  This will probably mean I have to go into API mode on the coordinator radio and implement some kind of round robin interrogation to gather data, but that is somewhat doable if I can get good documentation on the API mode.

For those of you that didn't understand most of what I said, I'll be documenting this stuff as I go along.  It's really not that hard, just strange sounding.

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