http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8471 a simple modification of that may be cheaper and look nicer

Posted at 12:17 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by biozz

“It can be used as a serial/usb replacement or you can put it into a command mode and configure it for a variety of broadcast and mesh networking options.”
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoXbeeShield

Posted at 12:19 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by biozz

man, i did that like a year ago… then fried one of the xbees by putting it in backwards. :( and 80 bucks for that shield… shit myself! arduino boards are for pussy’s anyways. miss limor is a cool bean though. guess i must make something myself for you to write about…

Posted at 12:39 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by charlie

try a search for rfm12, which is a tranceiver module for 5 euro ($6), those zigbees seems very expensive for the job. separate reveiver (rfm01) or transmitter (rfm02) are 3.50 euro, or $4.

Posted at 3:58 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by ragnar

@ charlie
well if you want to go there the arduino its self is sort of a pussy way to get things done almost but its the simplest (unless you want to dust off the old basic stamp 2) and it gets most basic things done

Posted at 4:50 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by biozz

zigbee is cool but horribly overpriced. you can get the 433Mhz Xciever boards for dirt nowdays.

Posted at 5:09 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by fartface

@biozz the xbee shield is neat but its not going to be cheaper, there’s also no real easy way to pass along the reset signal without adding more messy components :)

@fartface/ragnar: 433 & 900 mhz modules have a spot in my heart, but by the time you add error correction, retransmit, sleep mode, packetization, addressing, a/d inputs, point2multipoint, baud rate control, etc. its about $20 each ;) if you Just Want It To Work then I rather like the xbee’s

Posted at 7:06 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by ladyada

hey,
that’s a good idea, Xbee and Arduino make a good couple to build useful applications. Recently, I made my own RC transmitter/receiver with a similar principle: http://effetdebord.blogspot.com

Posted at 7:48 am on Nov 3rd, 2008 by obor

Can anyone point to projects using the zigbee / xbee for anything other than serial cable emulation? zigbee makes a terribly expensive serial cable in my humble opinion.

Lets see some mesh networking projects done on simple hardware!

Posted at 1:29 pm on Nov 3rd, 2008 by justDIY

@justdiy
at burning man this year there was an impressive example of mesh netowrking in action using arduinos and xbee transceivers. You can see the artist’s site here:
http://www.blueink.com/ThePool/2008/ThePool2008.htm
basically each pod has it’s on xbee/aruduino, multiple directional pressure sensors, and 24 color led’s. If someone steps on the pod; the pod lights up, and the arduino sends a signal to its neighboring pods who in turn light up and pass on the signal. the result is beautiful ripples =)

Posted at 6:05 pm on Nov 3rd, 2008 by paul

@justdiy
Hi, we at libelium (www.libelium.com) use arduino+xbee to create open hardware sensor networks.
We have developed squidbee (www.squidbee.com) so anybody can use it for their own developments. And is a growing community that develop with squidbee as you can see in http://www.sensor-networks.org

I hope this info can be usefull.

Posted at 11:43 pm on Nov 3rd, 2008 by Octavio

This looks like its idea came from http://rob.faludi.com/itp/XBee_DriveBy/XBee_DriveBy_presentaion.pdf

More information at
http://itp.nyu.edu/~raf275/meshnetworking/XBee/

Posted at 1:53 pm on Nov 5th, 2008 by vexorg

Has anyone published a tutorial like this for bluetooth? The bluetooth boards are rather expensive, and I’m really just looking to getting data through bluetooth, not reprogramming the arduino remotely.

Posted at 4:11 pm on Nov 5th, 2008 by lance

can anyone tell me how to use the xbee in
an ad hoc mode? it seems to always in
a “Personal Area Network” mode, configured
to their own way of doing mesh. i’d like
to be able to receive any kind of zigbee
msg and send any kind of zigbee msg.

Posted at 1:41 pm on Nov 10th, 2008 by t.h.