Best xbee low power combination

XBee & XBee Gateway
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1

Hi all

I have 4 xbee S2 in a star combination, 3 end devices and one coordinator. Each end device has one sensor and sends data every hour using ADC pin to the coordinator. All of the Xbees operates from batteries so i want to keep power consumption as low as possible.
I set end devices to cyclic sleep every hour so they can stay awake just a short period to send data.
The major problem is the coordinator, since i cannot set it to sleep. So my questions are:

  1. is there a better way to set up these nodes for low power consumption?

  2. I was thinking of power off the coordinator (using an external circuit) every hour, but what happens if the end device wake up and the coordinator is off? Will it sleep again? Retry the transmition until the coordinator is on? Crash?

Thanks

2

The coordinator per the IEEE and Zigbee specifications is an ALL WAYS ON DEVICE. That means that it is not to be turned off.

If the Coordinator is off when an End device wakes, will cause the End device to remain on and try to associate with a Coordinator thus resulting in additional current draw.

3

Is there a better way to connect them? Doesn’t make sense to have coordinator wasting power for an hour when all my end devices are sleeping…

4

This is an IEEE specification issue. You can’t change that. If you want a network where all of the nodes sleep, then a Zigbee network is not the correct product. What you want to use is a Digi Mesh network and product instead.