Hey all. I’ve had an XBee Wi-fi (stand-alone) (Rev B) since last summer and have never been able to get it to work. I may have bricked it at some point but not sure. I just got an XBee Explorer USB for it to try and work it. I had previously tried with a shield and an FTDI USB board but got nowhere. I plugged in the USB and let the standard USB files install themselves. Later I downloaded the Digi drivers and updated the USB drivers using those.
First I tried using X-CTU to “Test/Query” the board and that failed so I started looking into it. I saw the posts and blogs about “Un-bricking an XBee” where you flash the firmware but those didn’t do the trick either. The final one I found and tried was this: http://todigi.blogspot.com/2010/05/xbee … grave.html but it gets stuck at the stage of restarting the XBee after it finishes programming. I first start the board with the write of the XBee Wi-Fi firmware, and then when it says not found, I plug in the module while using a wire to jumper the reset to ground on the back of the Explorer. When the module is in, I unjump the RST and it starts programming. After the bar gets 100% it says modem not found again where the pop-up window waits for you to reset. At this point, I can’t get it to pick it up again using the wire jumper. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong. I also noted that at this stage there is no longer flashing of the LED on the Explorer indicating comms with the PC.
I emailed Digi and they said to plug a 470 uf capacitor (huge by the way!) into Pin 1. I asked an EE and he said that means between Vcc and ground for the XBee (which translated to 3.3V and GND on the Explorer). I’m really surprised that I didn’t see this written anywhere. Maybe I’m the first non-knowledgable person to plug a XBee Wi-Fi into the Explorer USB that needed the net for help? Anyways, it works! All fixed.
The XBee Wi-Fi draws quite a bit of current when it starts up, more than the voltage regulator on the Explorer can provide all at once. The capacitor smoothes this current spike so that the XBee doesn’t “brown out” on startup. This isn’t an issue for the 802.15.4 or ZigBee XBee by the way, just for the first-generation Wi-Fi model. That model is new, which is why the Explorer isn’t already designed for it, but the fix you did should work great.
gatohoser:
I emailed Digi and they said to plug a 470 uf capacitor (huge by the way!) into Pin 1. I asked an EE and he said that means between Vcc and ground for the XBee (which translated to 3.3V and GND on the Explorer). I’m really surprised that I didn’t see this written anywhere. Maybe I’m the first non-knowledgable person to plug a XBee Wi-Fi into the Explorer USB that needed the net for help? Anyways, it works! All fixed.
Hey.
I am also working with the xbee wifi module. Although i have the Arduino Wireless SD shield. I seem to also be stuck, and finally figured out that i need to add a capacitor to this setup. Is there any way that you can take a picture of what you did to add the capacitor to the explorer board. I just want to make sure that i don’t mess up, and break my module.
As far as i understand, for the wireless SD and the xbee wifi module. By adding a capacitor to vcc, that means it should be at pin 1, and ground is pin 10 (on the wifi module).
So please, if you can just take a picture of how you added the capacitor, and post it. That would be AWESOME.
The cap would be put on the ground and 3v3 lines. So the negative end of the cap(It may be polarized) to ground, and the positive directly to the 3v3 line on the side of the BoB