3 Way XBee-ing

Wireless & IoT
1

Hey everyone,

So I had a project in mind (specifically, a wireless lockout buzzer system), and was wondering if what I’m trying to do is even possible. I don’t have an XBee (or for that matter, three), and wanted to check before buying them. So here’s what I’m trying to accomplish:

  • A master XBee communicates with two slave XBees

    Each slave XBee needs to be able to send a single byte via UART to the master (this is the number of the player that buzzed first, one byte per team, per xbee)

    The master needs to be able to toggle a virtual line HIGH to reset the secondary XBees


    • So what I was thinking should work is to set all three to the same PAN, and set different MY addresses. Then the master, since it would only have to broadcast digital IO packets, could simply broadcast to the MY 0x0000 (broadcast address). Each slave would only have to send a packet to the master, so they could just send to the master’s MY address.

    So my question: would this work?

    Thanks!

    2

    Xbee’s do support individual addressing, so what you are looking to do is possible.

    It’s been a while since we did this, but we were working on a “drive-by” system, where Xbees were detected when in range of a sensor and they dumped their data to a master. Given enough time, I could dig up the code, but as I remember it was pretty easy to find in the spec sheet.