Book Image

Building Wireless Sensor Networks Using Arduino

By : Matthijs Kooijman
Book Image

Building Wireless Sensor Networks Using Arduino

By: Matthijs Kooijman

Overview of this book

Arduino has been established as the de facto standard microcontroller programming platform, being used for one-off do-it-yourself projects as well as prototypes for actual products. By providing a myriad of libraries, the Arduino community has made it very easy to interact with pretty much any piece of hardware out there. XBee offers a great range of low-power wireless solutions that are easy to work with, by taking all of the complexity of wireless (mesh) networking out of your hands and letting you focus on what to send without worrying about the how. Building wireless sensor networks is cost-effective as well as efficient as it will be done with Arduino support. The book starts with a brief introduction to various wireless protocols, concepts, and the XBee hardware that enables their use. Then the book expands to explain the Arduino boards to you, letting them read and send sensor data, collect that data centrally, and then even control your home from the Internet. Moving further more advanced topics such as interacting through the standard Zigbee Home Automation protocol, or making your application power-efficient are covered. By the end of the book, you will have all the tools needed to build complete, real-world solutions.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Software setup

Now that the hardware is covered, it is time to look at the software side of things. In this section, you will create a small sketch (called Connect.ino in the code bundle) that makes the Arduino send a VR command to the XBee module to query the current firmware version of the XBee module. The Arduino code is set up so that all API frames received from the XBee module are printed, so you can see the reply to this command as well, confirming that connectivity is working. No data is transmitted wirelessly yet; this just tests the Arduino-to-XBee connection.

Example sketches

In this and the following chapters, you will write some Arduino sketch code. All of the example code shown in the book is also available in the code bundle, which you can download from the Packt website.

The example code in this book is sometimes a bit more verbose than strictly needed. Sometimes this makes it easier to expand an example later, or sometimes the example illustrates some good coding practice...