Mstaffa81 wrote:Nnnnooo I'm afraid not.
So what was "the plan" ? Other than to figure out if it could be done (it can !) and then how do how been it's done. (I think that sentence makes sense)
A story if I may ...
There are advant-garde (my terminology, for lack of better terms) dance troupes that use EL wire as part of their act. They have many dancers doing many different things on stage and yet it all must be choreographed to make the show successful. You can Google to see such dances/shows on YouTube. There is a existing protocol for show lighting and effects, called DMX, that has a lot of equipment and years of usage behind it. But it's like killing a fly w/an atomic bomb for just a few dancers, each with a suit of 8 strands of EL wire. Still there are people who use DMX, originally a wired protocol, now extended over RF, to control such things.
As it happens there's a very active Christmas lighting community and some of these people have lighting shows that would rival any pay-for light show. Perhaps you've seen them on TV. To serve these people some smart guy, no doubt one of them, came up with a PC program called Vixen (named for the obvious reason). I, ever so briefly, dabbled with the old version of Vixen (2.0) and found it, after some experimentation, easy to use to program complex lighting schemes. The new version, 3.0 last I checked, was not so easy to use (at least not worth my time at that time). In any case people were using Vixen to "talk" over RF (yes, among the various types were XBees !) to control X-mas lights far away on their property. There's no reason that Vixen, old or new, couldn't be used to talk over an XBee link to your EL suit. It might seem, at first, like using an A-bomb to kill a fly, and that might be the case, but the old version was easy to program a whole show in ... so who cared.
To help a dance troupe, I wrote an Arduino program that took Vixen 2.0 serial data as input, perhaps from an XBee (that was their plan, I don't know if that's how they ended up doing it), and translated that data/commands stream into equivalent EL Sequencer commands, for up to 15 EL suits. You of course, only have one suit, and so would need a simpler version of that code. I'm not sure if the dance troupe I was helping ever used my code but I did have it working, as best as I could test, on an Arduino Uno. And so it should also work on an EL Sequencer ... fed data from an XBee. But it'll be some work for YOU to learn all this stuff.
Is this more than you wanted ? Or need ? Many people have made EL (or LED) suits that follow pre-programmed sequences of lights on/off. Then when they tired of those, they changed the onboard EL/LED programming to do some others. No Rf link needed. Certainly less effort and time than the above, if all you'll ever do is a dozen or so EL sequences.
So how badly do you want/need the remote RF control ??? It can be done, though perhaps not simply.
In any case I'll try to find that old thread here on the SF forums for you to read and I'll try to locate, if I have it on this "newer" PC, the aforementioned Arduino code. It won't help you with the XBee learning but it may be a piece placed in your puzzle of what to do.
