I have a school project comming up to make a wireless water level sensor.here is what it should do:
mesure water level(ultrasonice sensor,or pressure),using car battery as power source
*send the mesured data over a range of 100-150m
*the receiving end is conected to a pc
*the sender is mostly in sleep mode and should anly send data when water level goes under some pint.
Do i only need two xbees? no microcontroller? I’ve seen some tutorials where they connect sensor direct to the xbee and they could set the xbee through a program.
maybe a stupid question but im a little bit confused by what the xbee can do.
An XBee has a few digital IO pins and/or analog input pins and a UART.
Any of these can be used on a remote XBee to send back to the base.
Down load the XBee data sheets from Digi International. Also there are a few different hardware and firmware versions of the XBee that have important differences.
Whether you need a u-controller depend on the sensors used. If the sensor has a voltage or a UART output then it can directly interface (with maybe a few passives) with the XBee.
It depends what information you are gathering at the PC end. If you are plugging in the Xbee and just reading out USART data t othe PC in raw format, and that is aceptable (as you can process this using the PC software instead of a PIC/Xbee converting the tranferred data to a readable form), then yes just use a MaxSonar EZ1 sensor with Analogue output at 9.7uV per inch, connect this to the analogue input of a Xbee and the other end can (I think) be programming to just output the analogue information over USART. Check this with the datasheet. If not then a simple uC with ADC won’t be hard to add.