Electronic – Zigbee RGB control using Xbee

ledraspberry pixbee

In order to achieve this I was going to have the following setup:

Base Station

  • Raspberry Pi
  • Xbee 2mw

Led Station

My main questions are:

  • Is it possible to use the xbee to drive the tri-color driver without needed a microcontroller, arduino or raspberrypi on the led station side?
  • If I want to expand this in the future, can I add more LED and drivers combinations to be driven by the same xbee?

I'm new to this so any help or advice would be appreciated. Thank you!

Best Answer

Looking at the Shiftbrite LED module page and xBee datasheet, it would seem you can do this without a microcontroller.

The Shiftbrite LED module uses 4 lines (3 if enable always active) which are:

Data, Clock, Latch and Enable (both input and output pins, so 8 pins in total)
This means modules can be chained together easily, so you can add more Shiftbrite LED modules later on if desired.

The xBee has 8 pins which can be used as digital I/Os, and configured in "virtual wire" mode, where whatever logic level appears at the Tx input pin will be output on the corresponding Rx output pin.

So, with a bit of reading to setup the xBee for virtual wire mode, you should be able to write your code as if the LED module was connected directly to the R-Pi

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