Open Project Weeks - Wireless Sensor Network - Week One

Xbee Communicators

For the next two weeks, I am really looking forward to working with some of the materials on my desk and the Arduino IDE platform.  Recently I purchased:

• 4 Xbee wireless communicator notes
• 2 Arduino uno boards
• 1 mini usb explorer board
• 5 breadboards
• 4 battery packs
• 1 package of jumper cables
• 1 book - Building Wireless Sensor Networks by O'Reilly

I am hoping to build in the next week a wireless sensor network to take the internal temperature of a 30 yard mound of woodchips that is being used to heat our greenhouse.  This project, and the parts list above is over a month in process, as I was waiting to get a lot of the materials.  Now I am ready to dig into some coding - Python mostly, to execute the Xbee wireless network.  I'll update here.

For the first project, I am going to set up a simple chat between two communicators using a terminal window and configuring two Xbee's with the same channel.  One communicator will communicate with another communicator.  A good tool for doing this is the XCTU software by Digi.