Questions about XBee 1mW Antennas and USB Adaptor Boad

Vampireclown

Hello, I'm new to robotics/microcontrollers and just bought the Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller and working on building a simple robot. I would like to know if the XBee Antennas could be used as transceivers. I would also like to know more about Xbee USB Adaptor Board, its purpose, and whether I can use it to transmit and/or receive signals for control for my robot.

Mike Green

The device you're mentioning (here) is the xBee 1mW transceiver with a built-in wire antenna. You need one xBee transceiver on each end, one on the robot and one on your PC. You need a USB Adapter Board for the PC since the PC doesn't have a 3.3V logic level serial port. With the two xBee transceivers and the adapter, you can open a bidirectional serial connection between the PC and the robot that looks to the robot (and the PC) as if they were connected via a serial cable. You'll need some kind of program on the PC and a program on the Stamp that can talk to each other over the xBee connection. Look at "Getting Started with xBee" here for examples.