Nice work! You’ve assembled the XBee Explorer. You’re ready for the next
step. Or, if you’re a power user, looking to get the most out of your explorer,
you can check out the more “advanced” assembly below.
Advanced Assembly (Totally Optional)
For most basic-use cases, all Explorer boards should be good-to-go once
you’ve installed drivers. If you want to use any of the XBee’s I/O pins, you
can
solder male headers to the 0.1"-pitch pins inside the XBee headers.
This will allow you to plug the board into a breadboard, so you can wire
other components up to the XBee.
The XBee Explorer can be used with a USB cable and breadboard
concurrently – just solder some headers into the breakout pins. (Actually
solder them, don’t pretend like we did in the image above.)
Each XBee pin is labelled on the bottom side of the board. You can also
check out the schematic for help locating a specific pin.
If male headers don’t fit your purpose, you can alternatively solder in female
headers (to plug jumper wires into), or even just bare wire. Just make sure
you don’t solder anything into the top side of the board – or you may be
unable to plug the XBee in!
We won’t cover it in this tutorial, but those “DIO#” pins can be configured as
either inputs or outputs. That means you can use an XBee to directly drive
LEDs or motors, and read analog sensors or buttons.
Starting With X-CTU
X-CTU is free software, provided by Digi (the manufacturer of XBee), which
we use to
configure
and
manage
XBees, and test XBee networks.
If you haven’t already, head over to their website and download the latest
release and follow their instructions to install the software.
Adding XBee’s
Before continuing on, make sure you’ve plugged an XBee (correctly) into
your Explorer, and have the Explorer plugged into your computer. When
you installed the drivers for your Explorer it should have been assigned port
number. You’ll need that shortly.
After initially opening X-CTU, you’ll be presented with a window like this:
Page 5 of 16
