Arduino, BeagleBone and XBees - Oh My!

Sorry, I couldn’t find a better blog post title :-( This blog post is actually something like a mix of my two previous blog posts. I’ve enhanced the previous RGB Led Strip project controlled by an Arduino in order to send temperature readings via XBee to another XBee node. The reason why I want to do this is that I want to control some RGB Led Strips in my home with various intelligent modes (like the example one based on temperature). But as I need some sensors for this intelligence, I thought this was an interesting opportunity for building some Home Automation right there and gather sensors data from those lighting nodes to a gateway one which would keep all the data in a central place and provide a way to interact with all the various nodes. »

BeagleBone: Serial Ports and XBees

I bought a few months ago a BeagleBone. I wanted to experiment using it those last days in order to get some XBee data from my previous Stalker project. Having a bit of experience with Arduino and Stalker did not help much. The BeagleBone is a complete embedded Linux system and you can’t expect to use it as easily as an Arduino (although the NodeJS demo is really cool – programming via the web browser instead of uploading programs). Simple things like using the UART (the BeagleBone has 6 UARTs, but only 4 of them available for your programs) did turn out to be a PITA. Hopefully I could find some interesting blog posts explaining how to set them up. So in this blog post, I will try to explain how to set up properly UART1 and UART2, and then how to connect an XBee to UART2 (there is way more information available on the Internet on how to use UART1, hence my choice to illustrate UART2 usage) in order to receive the data sent by my Stalker. »