- Thu Mar 20, 2014 1:51 pm
#169588
Okay and if I decide to send the data quicker is there a way to do this without too many changes to the xbee and arduino?
No. If it was easy it was provided by default.However, I don't have a hard number at which throughput rate you'll need this. The Arduino has an internal serial data buffer, but it isn't very large I think. The Xbees also have a small buffer. But can always get filled to the top, so you would need two additional lines between the Xbee (CTS and RTS pin) and it's Arduino (any 2 data pins available) to let them tell the other to stop sending as the buffer is full. For the Arduino you need to write the code (or find a library that does this already), for it to respond to hold signals from the Xbee. The Xbee is pretty much hardware prepared to do this, but you may need to enable the RTS function on that pin (not sure which one), by writing a value to a specific register. Hardware flow control is what this is called. Software flow control is also possible, by sending specific bytevalues to make the other side stop sending temporarily.
Details are in the XBee manual for your device. Make sure you read it inside and out.
Ofcourse the baudrate plays into this too. The default baudrate (9600 for both Arduino and Xbee) is probably low enough for this to be unlikely. But it may happen.