XBee communication

Wireless & IoT
1

I am currently working on a quadcopter project. We are using an Ardupilot 2.5 as the flight controller, and are using a BeagleBone Black to send throttle signals to the Ardupilot. It can be done when the the BeagleBone is plugged into the computer via USB, but we would like to make this operation wireless. We have two XBee series 1 (the 1mW versions) along with two XBee Explorer USB’s, and an XBee Explorer Regulated from SparkFun.

Now, to my question:

We would like to use the XBee’s to send commands to the BeagleBone, which would send flight commands to the Ardupilot (analog throttle, pitch and yaw data). However, we can’t figure out how to get the XBees to talk. Initially, we were under the impression that the XBee could simply act as an invisible/wireless USB, but we cannot seem to get that to work. Is there any way to do this?

2

Simplify the XBee setup. First just get the XBees to ‘see’ each other. Query the XBee connected to the PC using X-CTU an the XBee document.