Serial Terminal Basics
This tutorial will show you how to communicate with your serial devices using a variety of terminal emulator applications.
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Hexadecimal
How to interpret hex numbers, and how to convert them to/from decimal and binary.
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Selecting an Explorer
Overall, SparkFun boards designed with the XBee footprint are hardware compatible with XBee Series 3
modules. They modules are drop-in replacements for Series 1 and Series 2 with a few exceptions. Below are two of those exceptions
taken out of the migration guide and hardware reference manual.
VREF
- VREF (pin 14) on the XBee Series 1 is not supported by the XBee 3 hardware. As indicated in the hardware reference
manual, you should not connect to this pin on boards labeled with VREF.
Brownout
- If your XBee 3 experiences any voltage brownouts or supply dips when powering up, your XBee may not start up as
expected. The hardware reference manual indicates that:
Parts with an early revision of the microcontroller unit (MCU) may experience an issue recovering from brownouts under
rare conditions.
To remedy the issue, you must power cycle the XBee Series 3 module. One method is to remove the XBee while the board is
powered. Then reinsert the module back carefully into the sockets. Otherwise, you can perform a hardware reset by toggling the
XBee 3's reset pin. To automate this, during startup, you can solder a wire between the reset pin and the 3.3V I/O pin of a
microcontroller Toggling the reset pin with a minimum of 50ns-100ns will reset the XBee Series 3. As an example, check out this
Arduino example code for the XBee Series 3 on the wireless joystick
.
For more detailed information regarding the differences, check out the XBee 3 Documentation.
Migration Guide
Hardware Reference Manual
Special Considerations for XBee XSC Modules!
For those using an XBee XSC series, the pinout is slightly different in the XBee family.
Pin 6 on the XBee XSC series uses it as a configuration pin (
as stated on page 96 of the datasheet
), instead of having an RSSI pin on pin
6 like most XBees. For standard serial UART pass-through uses, this module can be mounted to one of our XBee Explorer boards with a
small adjustment. For the explorer's, locate the RSSI jumper on the back, and
cut the trace between the pads
with a hobby knife. For the
XBee shield, simply disconnect the resistor or LED next to the RSSI pin using a soldering iron.
The first step to communicating with your XBee is picking an interface board that allows you to. XBee Explorers act as a gateway between
your computer and your XBee. There are a few to pick from, each offering their own, key differences. Here's a quick overview of each:
XBee Explorer USB
is the most popular of the Explorers. It's equipped with a mini-B USB connector, so you'll need the
to connect it to your computer.
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