Having decided on low power (1mw) Xbee's the wire antenna made sense. The range is
good line of sight but weakens through walls. This is no problem for me as I expect to
always have the control either local to the Bot or on a remote computer nearby for
autonomous operation. The XBee are really easy to configure. Now that Jason of
Roboticsconnection.com hasmade available a really excellent XBee 'HowTo' there is no
reason to hold back. You will need the USB adapter he mentions if you don't go all out
and get the XBee Dev kit as I did. XBee works very well and is very inexpensive. I
opted this route over Bluetooth as I only have Bluetooth in my Laptop. Also I can move
the XBee's to other projects later very easily.
This next overhead view gives more details of the layout.
© , 2009
Created:4/25/2009, by Don Lewis