Iron Bowl -using Xbees in Paintball
I am working on a paintball game concept based on a package (briefcase) that is reporting it's location on the field. The package will have two buttons, when a player gets the
package he presses their team button. The package will award out points every 10 minutes according to the team that owns the package and it's location on the field. The farther away from the team's
respawn point the more points awarded.
The package will report it's location and owner via Xbee's to a base station that will create two webpages: one for computers and the other for smartphones. The webpages will give out the location of the package,
time left in the game and the current team scores.
The distance from the base station to the far parts of the playing field is 1/3 mile. I got these Xbee Pro's with a mile range, but I am concerned if they will reach through the trees.
package he presses their team button. The package will award out points every 10 minutes according to the team that owns the package and it's location on the field. The farther away from the team's
respawn point the more points awarded.
The package will report it's location and owner via Xbee's to a base station that will create two webpages: one for computers and the other for smartphones. The webpages will give out the location of the package,
time left in the game and the current team scores.
The distance from the base station to the far parts of the playing field is 1/3 mile. I got these Xbee Pro's with a mile range, but I am concerned if they will reach through the trees.
Comments
a "carrier" signal -a letter repeating- so that when the package doesn't receive this character it lights a red led to signal that the package needs to be moved to a better spot.
But then I wondered if that would lock out the channel so that the package would be unable to send it's information back out.
Do xbees send and receive on the same channel? And if so is it possible to send on one channel and receive on another?
Lucky because I was planning on slicing the map into separate jpg's for each square. With three possible images for each one: blank, north owned case, and south owned case. These files will already
be on the web server, the propeller just has to write the html.
So the last picture I used my own grid. I am thinking the roving gps unit will do the calculations on which square it is in and send a grid reference over xbee instead of the lat and long. A letter for row and a number for column.
I needed a 1/3 mile range to cover the field, so now I have a choice. Move up to the next powerful xbee
or set up a network of xbees bouncing the information back to a base station.
You probably already know about the 900MHz XBees? They're supposed to have a range of 14 miles but a block's worth of houses will block their signal. (I have a pair of these.)
If you choose to use a network of XBee's the ZigBee (Series 2) version can take care of message hopping with multiple routers for you.
Another option that might cost less is to use nRF24L01+ Nordic modules. You can buy them on eBay for less than $3 each. Sparkfun also sells a couple different versions of these.
I had a project where I used a bunch (I think six) of these Nordic modules and had a message pass from module to module. I wrote a driver that lets you use these modules with a Propeller.
If go the XBee route, you might want to get the book "Building Wireless Sensor Networks". It explains how to use the ZigBee XBees.
back burner until I can get up some more cash (got lucky with the XBEEs as I used the $100 credit I won on Sparkfun).
This video updates the status of my various projects.
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