Remote Sensing with XBees, Hardware

The schematic below shows a battery-powered wireless remote temperature and humidity sensor. The wireless part is provided by an XBee Pro Series 2, the humidity sensor is an HIH-4030 and the temperature sensor is an LM335a.

The XBee is configured as an 'end-device' and periodically transmits three analog samples to its 'coordinator': humidity on AD0, temperature on AD1 and supply voltage on AD2.

The most important design decision was to run the XBee standalone, without the aid of a microcontroller, which had several consequences for the resulting circuit:

1. It constrained the choice of humidity sensor to the relatively-expensive Honeywell part, which outputs a voltage proportional to temperature. (Cheaper parts, such as this one, output digital data requiring a microcontroller to present it to the XBee.) 
2. The Honeywell part demands a 5v supply, and the XBee no more than 3.3v, entailing the further purchase of an Explorer Regulated to step-down the supply voltage for the XBee. (This is not shown in the diagram.)
3. The analog inputs on the XBee can only read up to 1.2v, so each sensor's output must be passed through a resistive divider to scale it down.
4. To conserve power, the XBee spends most of its time asleep, waking only to read the sensors. Its ON/SLEEP pin is asserted when it wakes but, of course, doesn't supply the correct voltage for the sensors, so a transistor is needed to switch the 5v supply.

Had the decision to use a microcontroller been taken instead (using an ATtiny85v, say) the entire circuit could have run from 3v, considerably reducing cost and hardware-complexity.

(The diagram was made with Eagle for which Sparkfun provides a library of circuit elements for most of the parts it supplies.)

The software side of this project will be described in a subsequent posting.