I have several end devices that will be set to go into cyclic sleep when their respective arduinos are set into a deep sleep mode. While awake and sending, frame data include a unique identifier byte so that I know which unit the data came from.
During cyclic sleep, I had planned to set each Xbee to send a random DIO pin value just so that I can see remotely that they are powered on and in cyclic sleep mode. However, I during sleep I still want to know which unit this "sleep blip" came from. This worked with one transmitting unit, but when I have more, I need to see some kind of identifier.
I can't use the node identifier, because during networking, frames may come from any given end device and the node identifier data does not tell me where the frame originated- only who it last came from. In practice, I may have some units asleep while others are awake and sending. There would be a high likelihood of a "sleep blip" being picked up and resent by another more active sender, masking its origin.
So my question is whether there is some way I can configure the Xbee to send a specific byte each time it wakes from cyclic sleep. My arduinos will be totally powered down while cyclic sleep is running, so I won't be able to feed anything to the Xbees. If only there were some tiny chunk of memory on the Xbee, or some parameter that I can set prior to sleep and configure the Xbee to transmit it every sleep cycle.
Or perhaps there's some way to configure the 802.15.4 network to NOT share frames between end devices. That way I could actually use the node identifier as an identifier and be sure of where the frame originated.
Anyone have any advice?