Simulation of a point-to-point wireless communication with XBEE technology for monitoring environmental variables

Abstract

This article describes the simulation of a unidirectional point-to-point radio frequency (RF) Wireless communication between two electronic circuits with XBEE technology, using the electronic design software PROTEUS V8.8. In the same worksheet in the ISIS graphical interface, the two electronic circuits were implemented, one was called the transmitter circuit and the other the receiver circuit. A Microchip® PIC16F877A microcontroller and an XBEE module are the main devices of each of the electronic circuits, to establish wireless communication by RF. The PIC microcontroller of the transmitter circuit was used as a DAQ data acquisition device, to measure the temperature of two analog sensors, the LM35 and the TMP36, and three digital sensors DS1621. The temperature data was sent from the transmitter circuit to the receiver circuit in character strings, using asynchronous serial communication. A programming algorithm was implemented for the PIC microcontroller of the receiver circuit, to receive and identify the temperature data. The development of this simulation is the basis to implement a wireless sensor network (WSN) with XBEE technology in the future.