I’m trying to set up a very power-constrained, solar-powered system that must wake up from deep sleep only when a request for data is sent out. Latency needs to be less than one minute, so using cyclic sleep on the Xbee to search for commands every 28 seconds (the maximum period) works fine enough.
My plan was to attach an ESP32 Thing to the “On/Awake” pin (#13) on the Xbee, and use the ESP32’s wake-from-sleep-via-pin-interrupt feature, but what I’ve discovered is that the Xbee turns on its “awake” pin every time it wakes from sleep, even when no data is received. This means that my ESP32 is also powering up every time, using up precious mA even when it doesn’t need to.
In hindsight, I realize it makes sense that an “awake” pin would be on whenever the Xbee is on, but now I need to solve this problem.
Can I configure the Xbee to only power this pin (or some other pin) when the Xbee has data to share with the ESP32? (And then send that data only after the configured number of Wake Host milliseconds)
I’m currently using the Zigbee TH REG firmware, but I’m certainly open to changing that.
What I would suggest is using the XBee 3 and its Micro Python option. This way, if the micro python sees data, it can trigger a DIO line which in turns wakes the device.