Constant "noise/static serial stream

XBee & XBee Gateway XBee - 802.15.4
1

Hi,

I’m just getting into this whole arduino thing, and I’m testing some XBee modules.
I have one xbee connected to my computer directly through a parallax xbee usb board (=Xbee 1) and the other is connected through another board of the same type to an ardweeny board with an atmega 328 chip (= Xbee2).

I set them up according to various guides; same PAN ID, reversed DL/MY, baud rate 19200, DIO7 - 1(CTS flow control), using PIN3 for some resetting thing, Xbee1 has I/O output enable, Xbee2 not.

I can send commands to the xbee connected to the ardweeny just fine, just turning on and off an LED, and it mirrors the command plus some text back.

My problem is that in between the “wanted” communication, theres all this “gibberish” showing up in the serial monitor of the xbee connected to my computer.
If I leave it untouched it seems to be just the same line repeating itself over and over, like this: ~…$…~…$…~…$…~…$…
or in HEX: … 1F 73 00 0A 83 00 08 24 00 01 00 18 00 18 1F etc…
With slight moderations, sometimes it seems to gradually change, other times just randomly jumps.
This also shows up if I power the “remote” xbee directly.

I can manipulate it to some degree by shorting the connection between the input/output lines of the xbee/arduino and ground/3.3v but I can’t seem to make it stop.

Is it just supposed to be like this, or am I doing something wrong?
I thought maybe I couldn’t get a clean LOW signal, so that it fluctuated mistaking it for a serial stream, but it seems to keep going even when I short the relevant pins.

Any ideas?
This could of course be extremely basic, but I just couldn’t find the right keywords to search for I guess

2

I’ve never seen a report in the forum of a problem like this, so I reckon there’s a good chance of it being something in your setup.

My first suggestion would be to try a different baud rate. If you get the same character sequence then either the remote XBee is sending it or it’s being generated in your computer. If you don’t, then it would sound more like a connection problem. That said, I can’t imagine what sort of connection problem would produce a repeating stream of characters.

What are you using for the serial monitor you refer to?

What happens if you remove power from the remote XBee?