Arduino and XBee

I heard a lot about using XBees for radio transmission between Arduinos and/or PCs. I decided to jump on this a few days ago and began by reading the excellent Building Wireless Sensor Networks book.

After intensive lecture sessions, I felt confident enough in using XBees and did a quick run yesterday afternoon into my “near-by” electronics shop and bought 2 XBees Series 1, two shields for the Arduino and finally a Sparkfun XBee Explorer USB.

I was able to get the Explorer to control a remote RGB Led controlled by the Arduino.

This was my first experience with XBees and this is really fun stuff.

Although I bought the Series 1 module, I actually intend to build a complete network made of Series 2 Xbees. They are a bit more complicated to use, but way more powerful when you need to create a network made of dozen of those modules.

I was about to make a “big” purchase from Cooking Hacks website (made by Libelium – the ones behind XBee) but I postponed this at the last minute when I saw an announcement telling us that they’re going to offer a 10% discount from black friday ‘til cyber monday.

I will post later on few blog posts on the Arduino related stuff we can buy. I made some nice discoveries while browsing the Cooking Hacks catalog ;-)