Xbee wireless application question

Hi everybody, I’m hoping to get some advice from people who’ve worked with wireless stuff before. I’ve never worked with it at all, but next semester for a EE projects class I’m going to be trying to transfer sensor data from a ATMega644 to a computer and send some basic commands back. It’s not quite this simple, but if I could get something working this summer that would allow me to send the ATMega644 a command to transmit data and receive a value from portD then I think I’d have the hard part done.

The problem I’m having is that I don’t know anything about wireless hardware and interfacing it to a computer. I’m also having a very hard time on google and tech sites finding a good beginners reference.

Can anyone tell me if the Xbee PRO with chip antenna and the Xbee explorer usb would be good to buy to start learning how to do what I want?

And if anyone has any good resources for learning about wireless communications that would be great too.

Thanks a lot!

Xbee and XBee Pro. Very good.

Pick up one of the books on IEEE 802.15.4.

And also bone up on basic RF propagation:

“link budget calculations”, free space path loss calculation, antenna gain, and so on.

Look at the ZigBee website for links - but don’t plan to use ZigBee atop 802.15.4 in your initial learning- needless complexity of mesh networking. Just use 802.15.4 and XBee’s wireless serial port extension capability.