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.

If you've never dealt with pull-up resistors, serial communications or wireless radios then this book is a good introduction. The material gets a little bit repetitive around the setup, configuration and troubleshooting of the radios but is otherwise clear and easy to understand.Unfortunately the real power of XBee radios is only realized when using API mode, which the book mentions but does not cover to a useful level.Consider this book as a good starting point for classrooms and hackerspaces where XBees will mainly be used for fun and education. If you're actually needing to build a wireless sensor network then this book comes up a bit short on depth and detail.

I really enjoyed this book. I found it contained a decent amount of technical depth, and included references and links to obtain more information on topics. The examples started appropriately basic and and in the end demonstrated some advanced concepts. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in developing XBee or Zigbee applications. The book covers the XBee 2 series, but I had no trouble adapting the content to my XBee 3 (for the purposes on this book, they are virtually identical and the XBee 3 includes a built in Microcontroller that can be used instead of the separate one added in a few examples in this book).

Awesome Book. Still having finished the whole thing due to the complexity of some of the last few projects, but I'm almost there. The book walks you through the Zigbee and Arduino technologies very well and then blends them into simple projects to get you rolling. If you look on YouTube, you see a lot of people replicating the projects in this book. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.The only suggest I would have for the author is to provide a chapter or two on capturing streaming data on the Com Ports to monitor the telemetry traffic. I was able to find some instructions and ideas on line to enhance the Arduino code to monitor the traffic and that helped me finally debug some of the projects.

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.

Unlike other books, this book is intended for a user of ZigBee radios, NOT ZigBee protocol stack developers. This book does exactly what it was written to do, it provides a basis for using ZigBee (series 2) radios with a microcontroller. The book covers basic AT command setup (modem like commands used for the simplest of ZigBee communications) as well as API (direct comuter ZigBee commands) usage.It does not assume any advanced knowledge of ZigBee or wireless communications. As a matter of fact it presents some inforamtion in an over simplified manner. This, however, is done with a great writting style and not all irritating to more advanced users (that is, you can skim the text for what you need).I would highly recommand this book to anyone just starting out with ZigBee radios. I would also note that this book does not cover the series 1 radios, which are not series 2 compatible, though the same principals apply.

Gives some insight into Zigbee networks. The first chapters were the best. I read the book on Kindle. The problem is the author used small screen shoots in the later chapters and they don't display very well on the Kindle. To see them you have to select the picture then zoom in the to read it. If the author refers to the picture in future pages it is cumbersome to jump back. Whereas in a paper book you just flip back and forth.