Week 4

This week we have all the components arrived,

The new equipment are:
1x USB interface for Xbee with a FTDI chips.
1x Ardiuno UNO board
1x Ardiuno UNO shield

We finally finish our own model of wireless sensor network,

This model is an example of point-to-point wireless network. There is an Ardiuno board and Xbee connected to the sensor which are used as the sending part, in this part, a digital signal is sending to the Ardiuno and convert to serial data, the microcontroller convert the data into 10 bit package and sent to the Xbee on the receiving side every clock cycle. The receiving part only contains a Xbee with USB interface, there is a FTDI chips over the USB interface which is used to  convert the 10 bit package into the serial data which could read by PC.

This model is simpler than the model we have made last week and becoming much more convenient.

The temperature displayed successfully on the X-CTU program as last week.

However our supervioser gives us a suggestion which ask us to make a program running on PC which can control the data receicing and sending process.

Week 3

The A to B type USB cable which was ordered in week 1 arrived this Friday.
The arduino mega 2560 board, arduino shield and Xbee USB explorer are still not available.
So I reordered 2 arduino uno boards with two shieds and told the technicain if they can buy that Xbee USB explorer from amazon we only need one board with one shield.

This week we generally finished this project, and there will be enough time for us to improve our work.

We borrowed two arduino uno boards with shield to achieve our target in week 3.

The above figure shows the other Xbee's detail. The serial number is important.

And this time we load the temperature program into one arduino uno and connect it with a breadboard to set up the temperature sensor. On the other side a arduino uno is connected with PC and we are reading the data through X-ctu softwere. Just one thing we need to change from we did in week 1, we set both boards' from usb model to xbee model.

The above figure a temperatures getting from one ardunio board and tansmitted to the other board and finally showed on pc screen

temperature sensor diagram:

Week 2

Components arrived: Xbee *2, Transistor DS18B20

Task: Wireless connected 2 Xbees, with one Xbee connected to the PC.

Task Response: Due to the lack of the requested components, professor Smith supplied us a Xbee

shield and an Arduino board. By using the limited equiments we finish half of the task, which

includes the connection between one Xbee and the PC.

Software enviorment: X-CTU ver.5.2.7.5 http://www.digi.com/support/productdetail?pid=3352&osvid=57&type=utilities

Problems encountered:

1. X-CTU can not communicate with the Xbee.

We finally solveed this problem by moving the jumper, which is over the Arduino board, to the USB connection side, after that, the PC found the Xbee after we pressed the restart button on the Arduino board and selected the 9600 baud on X-CTU.

The connecting result capture is shown below:

Week 1

Components arrived: Xbee *2, Transistor DS18B20

Target: to connect the microcontroller (a borrowed arduino uno) to PC and show the temperature measured by transistor on pc's arduino developing environment.

Finished the task by 4 pm. on experiment day.

Used a borrowed A to B type usb cable to connect the uno to pc.
Ordered for a new usb cable.

Developing Environment: arduino-1.0.2, download from official website.

Problems encountered:

1. Cannot install arduino's driver to detect the board since we don't have the access to the administrator's account on campus pc. Problem solved by using my own laptop.

2. Connected wrong pin of the transistor to the board which leaded to high temperature of the component. Problem solved by checking data sheet of transistor ds18b20 carefully.

3. Cannot read the serial number of the transistor. Temperature cannot be read without the address. Problem solved by modify the existing one wire address finder program.(connected pin 2 but wrote pin 3 in code)