I worked with Adi on the “Romantic Lighting Sensor” Lab for Sociable Objects Workshop. Since we do not have a photo cell at hand, we just used a normal potentiometer as the remote sensor. The code is from Rob Faludi’s course code sample page.
We had some problem at first with the receiver side and we didn’t find an effective to debug it. It was pretty clear that the transmitter is working fine since while I was using just xbee explorer board as receiver I can directly see the data coming from the serial channel. However I cannot get the code to work when I plugged the xbee back to arduino circuit.
I ended up using a processing sketch to print out serial data from arduino since I cannot see it directly by printing out data to the serial terminal in arduino code. So lesson learned:
1. the resister used to augment sensor output value to fit xbee’s 3.3v requirement has to be carefully handled, otherwise you do not get to use full range of the sensor output and it makes it harder to figure out the range to look for in the receiver code,
2. a processing sketch is necessary for debugging. it gives a lot of confidence while you can see what is in the data stream, at least for me.
simple remote xbee sensor
with feedback