Discussions

Hello friends!
I'm a very new to the diydrones community so please don't beat hard )

I've got:
1) ArduPilotMega1
2) 2 x XBee Pro 900 XSC modules:
   - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9085
   - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9087
3) XBee Explorer Regulated (from sparkfun):
   - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9132
4) XBee Explorer USB (from sparkfun):
   - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8687

I'm trying to get it work well altogether.
Via direct USB>APM connect everything works great, but not via Xbee...

So the first thing i had to do is to shorten the diode in 'XBee Explorer Regulated' to make its Tx line work somehow, otherwise i receive only zeros from the APM, i see that's caused by a tricky way of level conversion in that adapter. But then it makes XBee getting quite hot.
Then i set the APM telemetry port baudrate down to 9.6kbps by adding
"#define SERIAL3_BAUD 9600" to the APM_Config.h file, due to the XSC Bee speed limits.
Mission Planner connects well and i receives the sensors' data but i'm unable to 'say' anything to the APM. After the APM starts transferring the telemetry data it becomes unable to set the modes to upload the waypoints etc, it's even unable to reconnect - MAVlink freezes at the first step when requesting parameters and shuts down by timeout then. But i'm lucky to connect and to set something while APM is initializing only, when it has not started transferring lots of telemetry data yet :)

So i wonder If that caused by setting the telemetry port to 9600 bps? Or maybe that's the adapter's issue?
If that's due to baudrate settings maybe there are some other values in the code to play with? Some read/write buffer settings or anything else?

Next week I'll try to change the 'XBee Explorer Regulated' adapter for another but not the recommended one again [http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/index.php?title=XBee%C2%AE_Shield].

I appreciate any help.

Thank you!