Question About Received data with XBee Series 2 ZNet 2.5

Hello World, first time poster here.

I’m currently working on a project using XBees to light up LEDs wirelessly. I’ve been using two XBee Series 2 with the ZNet 2.5 firmware (because that’s all that will work on it for some reason) and have success in getting them to talk to each other.

I decided it would be nice to see what kind of output I’m getting from the receiving XBee using a dspic30f11 microcontroller connected to the XBee.

My current setup is as follows:

> XBee with ZNet 2.5 Coordinator AT firmware connected to PC with XCTU software. (XBee is on the serial Dev. Board)

> Xbee with ZNet 2.5 Router/End Device AT on Dev. Board at the receiving end.

> The receiving XBee then has a jumper from ground to ground of the dspic30f11 and from Dout on the XBee to serial receive on the dspic30f11.

> dspic30f11 is loaded with FlashForth 4.7 and has a ForthWord that captures what is being read in from the serial port and outs it to the terminal window on another PC.

Now then, for testing I decided to send single characters over the XBees and see what kind of output I’m reading from the Dout pin on the XBee using the above described setup. And I must say, I’m getting some really strange stuff. For instance, the following is what I got for a few characters:


a:  78  f8
b:  80  0  f8
c:  f8  0  f8
d:  0   80  f8

Does anyone have any idea what I’m looking at here?

Thinking it might have something to do with the baud rate on the dspic, I set the dspic’s serial baud rate to 9600, the same as the XBee’s serial and got the following:


a:  C0  0   C0
b:  0   0   C0
c:  C0  0  C0
d:  0   0   C0

I really have no idea what all these HEX values mean, so any help as to what I’m looking at would be great.

  • Justin B.