Experiments in wireless

A colleague at work has very kindly lent me a pair of Xbee clones - XRF v1.3 plus an explorer board and an Arduino shield.  Armed with a copy of Building Wireless Sensor Networks by Robert Faludi I've now managed to configure them to send a simple serial message to and fro.  I used CoolTerm on a Mac talking to Tera Term on my Windoze server.

What's also become clear to me is that by using all these shields, I'm fast running out of pins on my Arduino.  Certainly using the motor shield uses all but about 2 pins as it's designed to run up to 4 DC motors and a servo at the same time.  So once I get the arduino configured to handle the XRF serial input I'm going to abandon the shields for a while and prototype my own controls using a SN754410 quad half H-bridge chip for motor control and a breakout board for the XRF.  That way, I'm hoping I can manage my pin usage a bit better.  Plus it should look cooler!

Left: XRF on Ardunio + Shield; Right: XRF on explorer board