XBee XBP24 to XBee 3 migration

Wireless & IoT Other Radios
1

I’ve got some telemetry devices that are sometimes wired but sometimes use the XBP24 Zigbee cards.

In the past when making a wired one wireless, it’s simply been a matter of installing the XBP24 board on the headers and do a little front panel button pushing to configure.

After learning that the [XBP24 Series 1 is NLA, I bought one of the [XBee3 boards for experimenting. It’s not working. There are a lot more differences between the settings than I was expecting during side-by-side XCTU sessions. While the newer cards are said to be ‘backward compatible in many ways,’ I don’t think there’s any networking, encryption or other advanced configuring since the older cards worked out of the box.

Does anyone have any experience or advice switching over between these Zigbee cards?](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15127)](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/11216)

2

I wound up surrendering and writing to Digi. They replied very quickly and I was able to get these working following their suggestions below.

The XBee3 through-hole product only comes loaded with ZigBee firmware, so in order for it to be compatible with XBP24 products you first have to flash the 802.15.4 firmware load using our XCTU PC program. Once you do that, the settings will look very similar to the XBP24.

3

Hi brow,

Sorry we could not help here but I’m glad to hear Digi got back to you quickly with a helpful response. I’m sure this information will come in handy for others trying to switch between the old and new Zigbee/XBee radios. Thanks for sharing their response!