Hello,
My project uses an XBee Pro SX (XBP9X-DMRS-001) on a printed circuit board (PCB) to communicate to another XBee Pro SX a few feet away. The modules are in application transparent (AT) mode using 9600 baud. The non-PCB XBee is attached to a development board, which is connected over USB to a computer. Both RF modules are configured such that they should have a strong connection; however, we are experiencing an unusual issue where the XBee on the PCB will work nominally for several minutes and then, abruptly, refuse to transmit anything.
After doing some debugging we discovered that our PCB was attempting to transmit a large amount of data through the XBee. Based on this forum post, we suspected that we were exceeding the XBee’s data rate, so we changed our code to only send approximately 300 bits every second. This is dramatically less than the minimum 10 kb/s rate listed in the data sheet, but we are still running into this issue. We still suspect that the XBee on the PCB is “saturating” and for whatever reason not deciding to transmit. The RSSI looks fine as well, so I do not think this is an antenna issue. However, we are at a loss for what the root cause of this issue might be. Has anybody experienced an issue like this before? How did you resolve it?
Thank you for the help!