Hello , we use a lot of XBees for various purposes, sometimes an Xbee is needed because its frequency can cut through the powerful drone’s 2.4Ghz, but sometimes we use our kit on other stuff where we would like to rather use a photon or electron.
right now we need to write code on the particle device and have awkward jumpers from the difficuly Xbee headers to the particle RX/TX, and power pins.
Wouldnt it be good to have a particle board that simply plugs straight into the xbee headers and gives us all the fantastic features of the particle environment without needing to write any code, just get your two particles on the network and the second one receives all the data from the first one and outputs it to serial.
I don’t think that a shield like this will be developed now, as the mesh boards are coming in the next times.
However, for those who still want to use an XBee and doesn’t want to struggle with jumpers you can use this shield https://www.adafruit.com/product/2725 to plug in any XBee shield made for Arduino boards.
It may be expensive for producing many devices, but it can be useful for developing and prototyping.
I’ve never tested these shields, so if anyone did, please share your experience with us.
thanks jonas, I reconsidered it and realised that a shield is not needed, its just 4 wires that need to be connected: +,GND and RX/TX . The effort went into the firmware to store the Serial data and publish it to TCP and broadcast it on UDP, the code was a lot more time consuming than plugging in the 4 wires!!
I dont think that mesh on its own will solve this problem, there is still a need to convert serial ttl data and make it available wirelessly. Many sensors provide only Serial TLL output , particularly the big data type sensors like Lidar and drones so this problem is not going away its getting worse!