XBee Pan ID Support

Is there a simple way to get an XBee to change PanID’s to communicate with another XBee? Say Ive got 3 XBees. One hooked to the PC, one to a sensor, and the other to another sensor. The two XBees wired to sensors are on two different Pan IDs. How do I get the XBee hooked to the computer to switch between the two, and still gather data?

You can use the ID command to set the PAN ID. But that requires releasing and re-association between the devices. I think it would be better to have all xbees on the same panID, have them all in API mode, and directly adress a specific XBee to send the data. The adress of the sending sensor is part of the api frame header.

Does this work for both Series 1 and Series 2 XBee’s?

I can’t vouch for the Series 2 Xbees since I never used those. But it should for Series 1. Consult the manual.

UNTEngineer:
Is there a simple way to get an XBee to change PanID’s to communicate with another XBee? Say Ive got 3 XBees. One hooked to the PC, one to a sensor, and the other to another sensor. The two XBees wired to sensors are on two different Pan IDs. How do I get the XBee hooked to the computer to switch between the two, and still gather data?

The usual way to address nodes is by their network address, all within a single PAN ID. That is, PAN ID is like an 802.11/WiFi SSID and nodes have either (a) routed network addresses like IP in WiFi, or (b) MAC layer addresses like in Ethernet.

It’s really simple to use Series 1 and disable association and all that rot, no routing, no meshing. Then any node can talk to any other node using 64 bit MAC addresses. This would be like Ethernet NICs talking to each other using only their MAC addresses. A node can also send a frame to the broadcast address so all in-range nodes can hear it.

Every XBee has a MAC address given by Digi - it’s printed on the bottom.