Hi everyone, I’m working on a small experiment that interfaces a zigbee transceiver with the stellaris LM3S8962 kit and then receives signal on a laptop or desktop. The experiment is very simple: interface a zigbee transceiver with the stellaris kit; presh some buttons and send signal to a PC or laptop; then display the binary data to a window or console on the PC/lapto.
However, I don’t know where to start with. I’m a .NET guy and my knowledge about zigbee and embedded system is almost zero. I guess my questions are:
What zigbee device / adapter should I use? My guess is I need a transceiver to interface with the Stellaris kit and another USB zigbee transceiver to plug to the PC. However, I don’t know what device or adapter I should buy.
I know that I need to interface some push buttons on the Stellaris kit and send signal to the transceiver to transmit in the air but I haven’t had any experience for interfacing such things. Are there any tutorials you would recommend me to read to achieve this?
It seems I would also need to write some Windows driver to recognize the USB adapter and receive signal through this adapter. Again, I haven’t written any driver before. Are there any sources/tutorials I could look at to learn more about this kind of stuff?
Sorry for my dumb questions. I really appreciate all for your help.
I started a few weeks ago with .NET and ZigBee (XBee).
I don’t know the Stellaris kit, but I bought “XBee Explorer USB” to connect the XBee module to the PC.
From the .NET perspective the XBee module is a device connected to the serial port, to communicate with this device you have to use .NET’s SerialPort class.
There are at least two open source projects available on codeplex.com which deal with XBee, may you should look at.
To enter the whole XBee stuff I can greatly recommend the book ‘Building Wireless Sensor Networks: With ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing’ by Robert Fauldi and of course the XBee manual.
Is it important to have different kind of zigbee antenna for interfacing with the Stellaris kit and with the Explorer USB? In the other words, I guess the following are the hardware components I would need to buy but I’m not sure if I was right or not:
is there a reason you want to buy series 1 modules? The following article describes some differents: The Major Differences in the XBee Series 1 vs. the XBee Series 2
If your application consists only of two modules, then you should be fine with serie 1 modules. For my usage I see no advantage in using serie 1 devices.
I see no reason you have to buy modules with different antenna types, it’s up to you.
Maybe you should also consider if you buy two “XBee Explorer USB”. For the very beginning, I think using two PCs talking to each other (or one PC with two USB Ports, talking to himself) is the easiest method to enter the XBee stuff. I don’t know how easy it is to debug with the Stellaris.
Actually, I chose Series 1 because it came up on the list
I just read the article you attached. I think I’d go with Series 2 instead. I 'm trying to learn about the ARM Cortex stuff so I wouldn’t be able to run away from the Stellaris kit. Hopefully the thing will work
