XBee shield with arduino

[David John Barker]

Butt in any time Jerry Harry is using an Arduino board, I'm not sure if the same applies - it may do. That said, when programming xbees I always use a dedicated breakout board (like the sparkfun one mentioned in an earlier post) and leave the xbee shields to do what they were primarily designed to do - that is, communicate with other wireless modules. When used like this they work as expected on both Firewing and Arduino boards...

[Jerry Messina]

>>Harry is using an Arduino board...

Duh! I obviously need to work on my reading comprehension.

Never mind...

[harrybrooke6987]

Actually Jerry you are right, I have completely overlooked the fact that I had to switch around TX and RX. You see, I am used to doing this with a Arduino Wireless SD shield which has a switch on it labelled 'USB' and 'MICRO' which changes whether the XBee module communicates with the microprocessor or just the sub to serial chip. Without that switch on the firewing shield I simply forgot about it.
So the shield should work find for module - module communication and as I have it wired in USER it will work for PC to module communication since I've swapped TX and RXq

[harrybrooke6987]

Now I realise that the Arduino shield is designed to be used in the way I am trying to used the firewing shield. I'm only trying the firewing shield because the arduino ones are owned by my uni so I can't keep them