xbee and visual basic commands

can someone give me information on how to talk to the xbee unit via mscomm in vb? What are the commands you must send to the xbee to retrieve the string of information? Command list would be appreciated.

ebanks:
can someone give me information on how to talk to the xbee unit via mscomm in vb? What are the commands you must send to the xbee to retrieve the string of information? Command list would be appreciated.

XBee series 1 (not 2) without ZigBee is my assumption of your use case.

The AT commands XBee supports are in Digi’s documentation. It works essentially like a Hayes-compatible modem on a serial port. With the XBee converted to RS232 and connected to your PC, have you used a dumb terminal (Hyperterm, etc) to try the AT commands? When you understand this, you can mimick this in a VB program. Doing so is just ordinary serial port code in VB. Are you using VB6 or VB.net?

THe only tricky part of AT commands is the guard time, just like a modem: 1 second or more of no-data, then the plus signs in quick succession, then no-data, and you should see the OK response from the XBee. If you have the baud rate correct and the logic level to RS232 converter wired properly.

So set aside the XBee and get an old serial port modem and talk to it under Hyperterm then VB. Next, move on to the XBee.

In VB6 you create an exe project, make a GUI form that can display text, put the serial port OCX mscomm on the form, and write code to set the baud rate, RTS/CTS, and so on. Then use either polling or events to send and receive data. There are zillions of serial port examples in VB on the 'net.

After that, you might want or need to use Digi’s Binary API protocol instead of AT commands. It’s much more complicated and not needed for many applications.

I am actually just wanting to monitor the feedback from the xbee.

I have the VB portion setup and when I open the port and monitor the buffer I do see the feedback that would normally be shown on the Terminal page of the X-ctu. I am wanting to get the information that is being shown on the “Show Hex” screen of the X-ctu page.

Do you know how to get to this information. I will look at the DIgi website.

Thanks for your feedback.

Any new help???