Hi there! I've been an Xbee user for a few years as a professional and an independent developer. My current project requires receiving API packets from a remote device, but also using some local button presses for user input.
I have an Xbee3 receiving packets from a drone at a rapid pace, and I'm reading the packets over PC. But I also want to get the user button presses into the PC, and I would like to avoid adding a microcontroller or any extra hardware on the PC side.
Ideally, I would just wire the buttons up to the DIO pins and have the local Xbee construct some sort of serial packet and send it to the host PC, but I don't know if the Xbee3 can even do that.
Is there any simple way I can wire buttons to the local Xbee and read those inputs from the PC? Or would I have to constantly be running AT requests and missing my Rx packets? Alternatively, would the bluetooth functionality work for this? I need to get the user button presses quickly when they occur, but I can't be tying up the Rx process because I need all the packets I can get, and late packets need to be considered stale.
Thanks for your time and advice!