How To Create A Motion Sensor By Connecting XBEE Arduinos?

How many times did you wish that in some way the technical installations in your home could be modified so that their functioning loopholes functioning could be covered. Axel Dittmann had the same thought when his pet raided the garbage bin of his home office. What he wanted was to create a sort of warning signal that would alert him before his dog enters his office. So, what did he do? He brought in some boards, gear, along with few XBee controllers that could help him in creating the new system. To complete the task he also took a short shopping trip to market where he purchased Yun, Arduino Leonardo, 2 Wireless SD Shields, battery connector, and two XBee ZB modules.

 

 

However, any new project whether big or small faces a few bumps and road blocks. Alex could not connect the Arduino boards with his MAC since no MAC supporting version of these products was available that time. In order to get over that, he programmed all boards with XCTU. Still, he failed to find any kind of association for firmware alteration. The success was still afar even when he substituted the Series classes that were required for transferring the sensor electrical data with some other Serial interface. Yet, the online documentation failed to provide the guidance required for moving ahead. To sort out this issue, he added a few more things to the set up.

 

During the constant hit and trial, he discovered that the most important part for initiating XBee programming is USB-shield that connects the XBee modules from the PC to XBee via USB. He also used PiR motion detectionsensor and NeoPixel ring to complete the design. Once, all required things were in his hands, he started by reprogramming both XBee modules. He did do because one of these always needs to work as XBee Coordinator while the other one should be Router or End device. Every single XBee network requires a single Coordinator for successful working of setup.

 

 

His MAC software worked pretty well, once everything was in place. The only thing he needed to do was program a few connection parameters. Post this, he connected the Xbee modules with Wireless SD shield as per requirement. It wasn’t a very difficult task since the modules were pre-programmed for this purpose. He faced a few other obstacles as missed a few important points mentioned in documentation of Yun and Leonardo. Once, he learned his mistake, rest was a cake walk. He connected Leonardo with XBee End device, then used PIN2 for PiR and kept the code as simple as possible. He sent H (movement) and L (no movement) to wireless connection which gave it ability to alarm the signal whenever anything moved in its vicinity. 

 

The next thing was to connect NeoPixel ring with PIN 2 by putting Coordinator XBee to Yun. He used GND connector and the 5V for this purpose and then included libraries for NeoPixel ring. To keep things simple, he programmed Yun in form of receiver to just assess the characters sent by wireless connection.