Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing 1st Edition

This is a great book, To be honest I did a lot of research on series two Xbee's and arduino before I purchased this book. Everything I found during my research was in this book. So..... for the most part I wouldn't have needed the book. But it is nice to have all the information in one neatly formated book. I actually got this book from the public library first and did like it. So I then went ahead and purchased it.I was happy with the examples and with a little imagination I was able to rework the examples to meet my needs for my particular application. I do wish the book went into more depth in regards to mesh networks and trouble shooting, but for someone that wants to two or more xbees talking, this book will really help you out!In my particular application I started out with three S2B radios, but after finding they weren't going to have the range I needed I switched to 900mhz radios and I was still able to use the information in this book. The 900HP radios have a little bit different set up in X-CTU, but after figuring that out. everything went smooth.If there was a second book that went further that would be excellent! But I do want to say this " Digi's tech support is excellent!!! They were very helpful and supper fast in their responce to my questions. I could email them two, three times a day and they replyed to my emails every time befor the end of the day. I was supper stoked with there costomer service."I would recomend this book, Just be sure your working with series 2 radios, if your looking at this book.

This has been mentioned before, but bears repeating, as I purchased series 1 modules with the book. Nevertheless, many of the topics it covers can be used with either type of XBee radio.Quick tip: When shopping for XBee hardware to use with Arduino, make sure the adapter board you use to interface the XBee has power regulation built in so that you can connect the TX and RX lines of the XBee to the 5 volt RX and TX lines of the Arduino. Some of the boards don't handle that for you so you'd have to build a circuit to drop the voltage down from 5v to 3.3v. This took me a few days to figure out when I first got my radios.

This is an excellent overview of a difficult subject. I'm pretty new to the Arduino and prior to reading this book had no experience with the XBee. The book gave me enough of a foundation to build a small sensor network for my property (8 wireless nodes controlled by Arduino FIOs); Mr Faludi gives a clear, concise overview of the technologies involved and, perhaps more importantly, the motivations behind selecting different technologies. My remote wireless nodes contain LiPo batteries and I expect to get two to three months between re-charges; this impressive lifetime is due mostly to the implementation of sleep mode, a difficult subject which is very clearly covered in the book.One point of confusion that I still grasp with is the differentiation between series 1 and series 2 xbees. The book exclusively uses series 2 devices, while several of the more notable Arduino hobby sites (adafruit, etc) very vocally prefer the series 1 devices. To my way of thinking (perhaps influenced by the author's position), having sensors in a mesh network makes the most sense; I have yet to read a valid counter argument.I would also recommend that if you are seriously considering implementing a solution with multiple XBees to go ahead and purchase a Digi XPort X2 - they are available via the Digi site (though their online store is terrible) as well as Sparkfun. Remote management of XBees (including remote firmware updates!) is a very, very nice feature, and the iDigi integration extends this capability to any location on the internet. Pretty sweet. If you're interested, I blog about most of my hobby exploits here: [...]

As some other reviewers have noted, this book does not discuss XBee Series 1 devices in detail. I wanted to use mesh networking features and some of the more advanced capabilities of the Series 2 boards, so Faludi provided some useful information and the book provides good value.I have only two real complaints. First, the version of XCTU referred to in the book is outdated. There may be a little confusion between the details from the text and the reality of the more recent (and more flexible) XCTU program. Second, at the end of Chapter 2 is a trouble-shooting section. This is well and fine - but, the author really needs to add one more "fix." A worst-case scenario is that none of the methods suggested work... In that case, you may have to "Update the radio module firmware" from the configuration screen. Simply attempting to manually reset some offending parameter may not work. In my case, I had to do this because the Coordinator and Router refused to assign the same channel number, thus they could not communicate. After re-flashing the firmware, even though the latest version had already been installed, this fault went away.

I probably would have thought twice about buying this book if I knew it was only concerned with the series two xbees. The series one xbees are far more popular and much easier to use. Since this book is presented as an intro to wireless xbees, why only concentrate on the more complicated series two? The series two seems better suited for bigger more ambitious projects that would not have a need for an intro book. Since series one and series two are incompatible, you should google xbee series one vs series two and decide which series you want to work with. If you plan on working with series one, then don't buy this book because you won't be able to do any of the projects very easily.