Hi,
I am wondering if the older LilyPab xBee board DEV-12921 will work with the latest generation xBee series 3 module WRL-15128.
Thanks!
FB
Hi FB.
We’ve not tried the newer XBee modules on this board, but noting in the schematic raises any alarms. It should work for you. 
Hello again and thank you for the help. The xBee3 modules worked just fine with the USB explorer, so I can confirm that much as least. I’ll put them on the LilyPad break out board soon.
I needed a little more help with this project as I’m really new to xBee. I think I might have misunderstood how they work. I have this model xbee WRL-15126. My goal was to make 6 wearables with LilyPad and the xbee modules. Each wearable would have LEDs and a LilyPad accelerometer. The LEDs would then blink faster as the kids run faster and the slowest wearable would flash a different color LED.
I saw that the xbee modules have all of the I/O pins that I would need to pull this off, but I can’t tell if I need an arduino module like the LilyPad Arduino Simple Board to actually control the xbee modules. Would I need a single Arduino simple board to orchestrate everything, one for each jersey, or can the xbees be directly programmed via Arduino or micropython directly to control blinking rates etc?
Thanks,
FB
I’m not familiar with using micro python directly on the XBee so I can’t say for sure how to do that. It’s probably possible to program the XBee directly to blink your LEDs but I don’t think you can connect the accelerometer to the XBee without some serious programming.
We would recommend using an Arduino board to handle all your LEDs and the accelerometer and just have the XBee used for wireless serial communication. The XBee would probably need some programming in it’s XCTU software to be setup correctly for the type of network but leaving that alone for just communication would be the easiest route.
One last thing: An accelerometer would be great for measuring how fast someones pace is while they “bounce” during running, but it won’t be good for telling how fast they are running. A short person that runs hard but isn’t terribly fast would look faster to an accelerometer than a tall person that was running easy. (Short legs don’t go as far per step as long legs.) If you’re trying to measure the speed someone is running rather than how fast their steps are, something like a GPS would probably work better for you, but those won’t work indoors.
HI TS-Chris,
Thank you for the reply, that helps. I purchased a half dozen of the LilyPad Arduino 328 Main Boards to handle the actions on the costumes and then the xBees can communicate between the costumes. I’ll just use the accelerometers for general activity and not velocity as all my research suggests this will be a bust. And you’ve confirmed this.
So I have everything piloted and running beautifully on some Arduino nanos running the lights and xBees. It’s REALLY cool to see this all coming together. I have 6 costumes and all of the lights between them are all coordinated to play fun games between the people wearing them. I got the FTDI adapter working wonderfully on the 328 Main boards, and I think we’re almost ready to rock.
I noticed one big issue though that now has me very nervous and prevents me from sewing in the final costumes. The Arduino Nanos that I’m piloting this from all have 3.3V outputs that I’m using to power the XBees (series 3 PCB antenna versions, WRL-15126). But I see the XBees take a max input voltage of 3.6V. All of my costumes are powered by LilyPad Simple Powers (DEV-11893) and 3.7V batteries (also from Sparkfun). I’ve read that those batteries when fully charged can even reach higher voltages, temporarily. The LilyPad Arduino 328 Main Boards don’t seem to have a 3.3V power out pin, so I am not sure how to wire up or power the LilyPad XBee boards. In fact, it seems no LilyPad control boards have 3.3V out. Can I drive the XBee’s safely from the LiPo Batteries? I really don’t want to fry half a dozen XBees and I really don’t want to ruin the projects aesthetics by hard soldering a lot of components to the costumes.
Please advise,
FB
Nevermind, I found that it does have an unregulated power input from this website.
https://www.lilypadxbee.faludi.com/about-board/
I connected to that and everything is working well. Pretty cool.
FB