Starter kit for XBee with Arduino.

[Dan Linder]

Ultimately I need two Arduino boards to communicate with each other over a short (~25 ft) distance wireless.  I've been playing with an inexpensive 434MHz transmitter/receiver pair from Sparkfun, but I'm concerned about reliability and consistency of the messages making it through all the time.  I'm working with middle-school students so I don't want to make this overcomplicated on the programming side (CRCs, error checking, etc).  My understanding is that the XBee hardware modules and libraries take care of all of that and it's exposed as simple string commands.

In looking around for "XBee Starter Kits", I found this one on Sparkfun titled "SparkFun XBee Wireless Kit - KIT-13197" for $95.  I'd end up adding a second Arduino XBee shield for $15 to put on the second Arduino.

Before I pull the trigger on this, are there other sources that I should look at for the same mix of parts that might be cheaper?  (Though I don't mind supporting a company like Sparkfun - they seem to be decent within the maker community.)

While at RadioShack over the weekend I saw that they have the Seeeduino XBee shield on sale for $6.99 (this: http://www.radioshack.com/seeed-xbee-shield-version-4-1/2760385.html). I might buy this instead of the $15 one from Sparkfun...

Just wondering what others have come across recently.

Thanks,
Dan

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[Kearney Lackas]

I just purchased four RFM69HW's for around $5 each. From this instructable, they look very powerful for that price.  From what I understand their library handles all of the complicated stuff... There are other examples in the GitHub. I can't wait to get these into a project but haven't found the perfect one yet. I purchased mine on ebay about a month ago.

By the way, I am new to this group. I have been meaning to get out to your meetings but just haven't gotten there yet.

[James Woody]

Is Bluetooth an option?  I used mine in an Arduino/Android application, and the Android handled all the pairing, so I'm not sure how difficult it would be naively in Arduino.  It *might* be cheaper than the XBee's.

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[Dan Linder]

Well, I purchased a pair of 434MHz components from SparkFun (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10534 and https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10532).

Good news: They came in and were not too hard to get setup.  Communication across my test bench was 100% reliable.  The latest libraries for this are the RadioHead (http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/RadioHead/) libraries - a replacement for the older VirtualWire (http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/VirtualWire/) libraries.  Once I got the "C language" portion of my brain dusted off to work with pointers/characters/strings, sending data was easy.

Bad news: The main use in this project is to transmit settings from one side, then move a servo based on those settings.  When I included the Servo libraries, the code wouldn't compile.  Both Servo and RadioHead/VirtualWire require the same internal clock for their communication. 

I looked into some Servo alternatives, SoftwareServo and ServoTimer1, but both of those were causing problems with compiling and throwing different errors that people "got around" by falling back to the regular Servo library.

So, I've purchased a pair of nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz trancievers off of Amazon for $8: http://amzn.com/B00E594ZX0

I won't have time to play with these until early next week, but I don't anticipate the timer issue since they use the SPI interface.

Dan