These are the ramblings of Matthijs Kooijman, concerning the software he hacks on, hobbies he has and occasionally his personal life.
Most content on this site is licensed under the WTFPL, version 2 (details).
Questions? Praise? Blame? Feel free to contact me.
My old blog (pre-2006) is also still available.
See also my Mastodon page.
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XBee modules are a range of wireless modules built by Digi, and are typically used to add wireless connectivity to Arduino or other microcontroller based projects. To configure these modules and update their firmware, you can use the XCTU configuration utility. This utility uses a serial port to talk to the XBee module, so you will need some way to connect to the XBee module to a serial port on your computer (using a USB "TTL" serial port, a "real" RS232 port has too high voltage).
The easiest way is to use a dedicated board, like the SparkFun Explorer USB:
However, if you already have an Arduino and an XBee shield for it, you might want to use those to connect XCTU to your XBee module. In theory, this should be a matter of re-arranging some wires, but in practice I've run into some problems attempting this (depending on the hardware used).
In this post, I'll show a few ways to do this using an Arduino and a shield, and explain some of the problems you might run into.
My book about Arduino and XBee includes a chapter on battery power and sleeping. When I originally wrote it, it ended up over twice the number of pages originally planned for it, so I had to severely cut down the content. Among the content removed, was a large section talking about interrupts, sleeping and race conditions. Since I am not aware of any other online sources that cover this subject as thoroughly, I decided to publish this content as a blogpost separately, which is what you're looking at now.
In this blogpost, I will first explain interrupts and race conditions using a number of examples. Then sleeping is added into the mix, which again results in some interesting race conditions. All these examples have been written for Arduino boards using the AVR architecture, but the general concepts apply equally well to other platforms.
The basics of interrupts and sleeping on AVR are not covered in detail here. If you have no experience with this, I recommend these excellent articles on interrupts and on sleeping by Nick Gammon, which cover interrupts, sleeping and other powersaving in a lot of detail.