XBee Relay Trigger

[James Sentman]

> On Dec 5, 2020, at 11:59 PM, Burk Roberts <cyburk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 1. Do the physical connections seem correct? 

I THINK so. The relay board needs to accept 3.3v input for it’s logic. If it also has 3.3v relays on it then thats probably a given but just to double check as they do come with 5v inputs that would not be able to see the 3.3v from the xBee. Ah never mind I see you have a link to the relay module, I have some of those connected to other things and they worked fine there indeed I think those are the ones I recently tried to connect to an xBee and they did work OK there.

Are the xBee and the relay board running on the same 3.3v power supply? If not then you need to provide a gnd connection between the 2 systems. That should not cause any issues power wise but it will let the logic voltage be seen between the two.

> 2. What settings do I need to alter in XCTU to properly configure pin D101? 

What model of xBee is this? I don’t recall that many digital IO pins on the series 2, 2.5 or 3 that I have experimented with before. are there yet more xBee’s with hundreds of pins? If so those may not be supported by XTension and you may have to go with an AT command version of the firmware and a DIY interface to send it commands. That should be fairly straightforward even if you need to do that though and the AT commands for turning on and off a pin are all ASCII and simple to do that way.

If it’s a supported version of the xBee in XTension then the one connected to the computer needs to have the network coordinator with API firmware on it. There are generally 2 versions of each firmware update for the API commands which XTension uses and the AT command version that you’d use if you were rolling it yourself.

Next you’ll need to make sure the pin you want to use is set to output in XTCTU. They give choices for how you want it to startup, I assume that in this case you’ll want it to startup off so that your gate or whatever doesn’t open whenever the power flickers ;) 

Once they are connected properly and configured you would create a unit in XTension to correspond to the pin. Create a new unit and assign it to your xBee interface. The Unit Address for controlling a digital pin is the 8 character ID of the xBee radio followed by a capital letter D and then the 2 digit number of the pin. Which is why I’m suspicious about the xBee radio model being D101. If it was digital pin 1 the address would be something like XXXXXXXXD01 with the X’s being the hex address. For mine it looks like 4031231BD01. Make the device type popup say “Digital Input/Output” and make sure that the dimmable checkbox is not checked.

Once you save the unit you should be able to control the Unit and it will make the same changes to the pin.


Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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