I am struggling for years to use Xbee’s in a home automation system where every room has a touch pannel and one gateway with Xbee and TCPIP is the center of the system.
Can someone advice to below questions please?
1/ What is the fastest way to communicate? API or AT mode?
2/ It looks like enabling ACK causes many delays and slows down the average speed. Is it really needed the ACK? Will the network still heal itselves whith out using ACK?
3/ Should there be a difference in speed between Zigbee mesh and Digi mesh? During my recent tests I can not notice any difference. I send strings of 46 bytes simultaniously between 2 nodes at 50 times / sec. Both get all messages ( so 100 messages of 46 bytes) But more is a problem although it is only 50 % of the > 100kbps in the specs.
4/ Between 2 nodes the speed is ok for fast dimming and color changes. The problem starts when I want to send the same data to multiple nodes.
Broadcast seems the worst choice with huge delays.
Unicast to multiple nodes works but now my question is how to get the maximum speed out of it.
For example I use S3B modules to avoid to many hops…
Is there a way of asking/forcing the network to use as LESS hops as possible to increase the speed? But still keep the requirement that the message need to arrive!
Since I read S3B 900 should go 610 m indoors, even when the modules are in the wall they should be able to reach the coordinator in a normal to huge house right?
5/ Point to multipoint with S3B , how to configure it? My central unit I call master, the nodes in every room I call slaves.
6/ Should point to multipoint be faster then digi mesh?
7/ Can point to multipoint handle simultaniously data from master to slaves and some slaves to master?
8/ Imagine a huge house, Can I have 1 and only 1 repeater in the middle to avoid to many hops? IF so how to do that please?
Thanks in advance and kind regards,
Wim