Xbee on a protoboard
First of all – breadboards are evil. Sure, they are handy. But when you spend a whole day chasing glitches which drive your logic analyzer crazy, it’s not fun. I moved my Xbee setup on a protoboard; picture on the right shows the result. The capacitor on Xbee VDD pin is essential – the module generates pretty strong spikes every time it starts transmitting and without the capacitor one should expect to see glitches every 250ms or so. The manual recommends bypassing VDD using 1uF and 8.2pF caps in parallel; I’m using 0.1uF here and it works well also.
In the previous article, I talked about switching in and out of command mode on an Xbee module running AT firmware. You can do exciting things with AT commands; however, when you interact with the module via RF link, how are you supposed to see the output of an AT command? In command mode, all output goes back to the PIC USART, so we need a method to capture it and send back to us.
The following function is called from CLI. It queries every AT command, stores the result, and sends it back after going back online. The usual way of doing that is to switch to command mode, issue all the commands capturing output to a buffer, then switch back online and send the buffer contents back. PIC18 doesn’t have enough RAM to hold such a big buffer, that’s why this function queries one command at a time. Because of that, the function is quite slow – the guard time before sending “+++” is one second plus it needs to wait for RF transmission of previous result to complete before switching to command mode for the next query. It takes approximately 3 seconds per query and querying about 60 commands takes 3 minutes.