XBee Wireless Programming Arduino

[ackbar345]

DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE,

This is what we know so far:


I was struggling with the tutorial Ladyada has posted. It worked maybe 1 time out of twenty for me and more than a foot range. I tried all sorts of settings with the com port latencies and delays. Then I found this tutorial:

http://www.seancarney.ca/projects/wirel ... rogramming

It seems like he has the Receiver/Transmitter settings flip flopped from Ladyada's. Oddly, this works with the hardware mods in Ladyada's tutorial? Maybe the settings are backwards in her tutorial but the hardware is still correct?

Also he has Xbee retries set for 3 on the receiver. I think the only other difference is he references the DIO Change Detect pin directly with 8 rather than FF. I suspect the retries is the important difference, but I also applied these settings with AT commands through the terminal rather than with the XCTU settings as I had been doing. Seems to be working perfectly now.

Setup: win 7 64bit
Xbee Series 1 - 1 mW Wire
Adafruit Xbee adaptors
Adafruit FTDI Friend ( do you not have one of these? you should have one of these.)

[ackbar345]

Update:

OK I have been using the link for several days to upload to a board installed inside of a machine and it works great. The dropped connection is now the 1 in 20 instead of the successful one. I also have a perfect serial debugging link, after remembering to set the serial terminal to the xbee frequency (in my case 56k). I am running a 1284p on a custom Sanguino-style setup. I am doing my uploads/serial debugging from the Arduino 0023 IDE.

There was one case where I had to manually cycle the power to the board before I could upload again, not sure what that was about but if you start getting a lot of failures try that.

I am no longer sure the Xbee retries are a good idea, I will take them out today and see if it makes a difference. It may actually be problematic, I think I have noticed it throwing retries after a successful upload.

//still haven't had all the coffee I need to reboot

[thefatmoop]

I've been having the same issues with ladyada's guide on wirelessly programming the arduino with xbees. It works but only about 1/5 or so tries, and i'm just uploading the led blink program.