XBee stop sending for 1 or 2 sec then continue

Hi,

My xBee is sending data normally to the MC Board but for a reason that I ignore, it stop every 20 or 25 sec for about 1 or 2 sec then continue sending. Does it have to do with sleep mode?

xBee is power with 2 AA batteries. One Tilt sensor (this one http://www.interface-z.com/produits/cs10_accelerometre.htm) is plug into analog input 0 and 1 and one switch (mercure drop) is plug into input 6 set as digital in. xBee have the 10C0 firmware version and setting as on the one post by Aaron Tunell here http://www.makingthings.com/Members/tunell/xbee-files/

Thanks

Claude

Some simple debugging questions - Would you know if your app was rebooting? If not, perhaps you're having a major crash, or power flicker, or some other outside problem. Try sticking a simple boot indicator LED with delay in the sequence, so that anytime you power up or reboot, you get a nice 1s light up on your boot LED. You mention the XBee sending the data to the MC. Are you sending it via the serial port? If so, have you checked the buffer status on the serial port? Are you overflowing it? What's the drain/fill rate on it look like? Do you have the capabilities to watch the power consumed by the board? Try powering it externally and sticking a meter of sorts in line, and see if you're entering sleep manually - if your power consumption drops like a rock, you'll know. Similarly, you can use a fairly fast heartbeat signal (10ms period?) at very low priority and watch it on a scope or LA and see if your timing changes for some reason. Just some debugging things you might not have tried that should give some more info.

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your answer but, my knowledge of the whole system don't alow me to understand your message. I am very new to this kind of material. I have no idea how to monitor the serial port. What I know is that the MC board does not have this problem when I connect sensors directly into it, everything is ok. No Lag. But with the xBee pro (I think it is version 2) I experiment this lag every 10 sec or so. And this is compromising my projet. I work with MaxMSP if it can help.

Claude

As Greg mentioned, do you notice your Make Controller rebooting ever? If you're running the Heavy firmware, you know when it is rebooting when the LED on the Controller goes on solid for a second or two, as opposed to its normal blinking. This sounds like a plausible explanation. And just for testing, have you tried unplugging anything else from your Make Controller to help isolate the problem?

The MC does not reboot. The problem seem to be the sample rate of the xBee. I was using sanplerate at 50 as mention in the tutorial. It is too fast! With samplerate at 100, the problem is less important, at 125 it look OK. So i changed to 125 and have more pleasure with the unit.

Thanks for your help

Claude