Troubleshooting flaky connection on Xbee Pro S2B

Question

Hello all, I have a question regarding troubleshooting a seemingly flaky connection on a set of Xbee Pro S2B devices. One is set up as the Coordinator and the other is Remote. The two communicate okay only sometimes. I am using a Zigbee Explorer on the coordinator end and a battery-powered Xbee Remote adapter on the other end. I'm constantly transmitting Serial data between from the station to the coordinator. What I notice is that sometimes it drops packets/data as I am watching the output from the coordinator's terminal. I know the issue lies somewhere in the settings because when I use a different set Xbee module (smaller range version) I don't have the dropouts. I also have fresh batteries on the remote so I'm pretty sure that isn't the issue either. Is there some specific setting I can set to prevent sending or receiving of a packet if it's not complete? Or is there some other problem I'm not understanding?

Answer 1

Bottomline is that you WILL drop some packets regardless of your settings. An XBee of any age always does 'best effort' to move a packet, but at some point, it just gives up and tosses it. Your app will need to handle errors and missing data.

Also, be careful with competing non-Wifi "WiFi-compatible" devices like portable phones. They often TRASH one of the WiFi bands completely when used. For example, we worked at a restaurant install, where things work great - until the drive-through opened. Once the portable head-set was used to talk to customers, the Xbee error rate rose up about 65% lost packets and overall functionality suffered greatly. We had to discover the bands 'trashed' by the head-set and configure the Xbee to NOT use any of those frequencies ever.

Answer 2

What is the remote side configured as? Is it as a router or sleeping end device?

How much data are you trying to put thru? That is what is the streaming limit you are trying to achieve?

Comments

I have the remote unit configured as a 'Router'.  As far as the streaming limit, I know that I'm outputting 14 ASCII characters per second.

---

Just as Coralyn has indicated. Any communications scheme including a wired one, data collisions, corrupt or missing packets will occur.  You need to take that into account within your application and determine if you need to issue any retries within the App or accept a given amount of missed packets.