Xbee Pro S1 in AT mode on Arduino: Serial buffer overflow screws up the firmware??

I’m trying to read serial data on the main serial por of my arduino mega via Xbee pro S1 in AT mode. No coordinator, no sleep, no encryption. The xbees work great in XCTU, and I know they’te working on the arduinos too, except for my buffer overflow. I can still see the right digits in there, I just don’t have my buffers set up correctly yet.

Byt my concern is that when I take my receiving Xbee off and plug it into XCTU again after receiving buffer overflowed data, XCTU reads all of the entry fields as gibberish, and I recognize my data in there. and I do mean EVERY field. Even the high and low serial numbers, firmware version, end everything. I had a hell of a time even getting XCTU to recognize and load the radio. Then When I finally had it added, I couldn’t use the write button to write the default values. I couldn’t even reflash the firmware because it was “incompatible with the radio” Finally it flashed after I manually wrote each individual value back to default.

The weird part is that the Xbee still seemed to work just fine, even in spite of the buffer overflow that made my data unintelligible.

What gives? is this normal?

No, I have never heard of a buffer over run causing the issues you have described. Could it be that you are not using an arduino shield connect the XBee to the Arduino?

I’m using a pretty decent shield by seedstudio for the Arduino, and a sparkfun explorer USB dongle for the PC

As an update, I think I may have figured it out. I realized that as I was connecting to XCTU, my transmitting Xbee was still on. I guess the Xbee is just incapable of any other communication when receiving in AT mode.

Correct. The XBee can only perform one function at a time. That is it can either be in a sleep state, receiving RF data, transmitting RF data or be in command mode.