Sleep Mode – Timer Setup

Upgraded to wordpress 3.2. Quite painless.

Setting up the Timer

I received my components from digikey to finish the mesh based data collection prototyping. One of the components is the LTC6991 timer chip. I never soldered surface mount devices before so I did my share of reading up on it. Mine turned out functional but not the best looking. Hats off to those who make it look easy. The IC is TSOT-23 and I purchased a breadboard friendly board to solder it to.

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New Project – Xbee Mesh Network and Data Collection

I needed a project to dabble and distract me in a constructive manner.  The goal for this project is to build a low power data collection network to sample  slow changing analog data such as temperature, ambient lighting, among other things. The constraint given was to use XBee Series 2,  run in API mode, and operate on batteries.

I purchased 5 XBee Series 2s to experiment with. I used X-CTU software to configure the Xbee chips as per the last project I did. The difference this time is I did not want to use AT mode but API mode to give me more control over XBee interactions from the Arduino host software. The  project context is as shown below.

Arduino to-be
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