If I had known that the price of an answer was to be chastised by the first person to comment on my question, I would have posted elsewhere. Lesson learned.
"The price of answer was to be chastised?" What did you mean by that statement? And what lesson do you think you learned? This isn't a teaching forum, and I wasn't trying to chastise anyone, just suggesting that you haven't been very diligent yet in seeking answers before posting here.
I can remember having to spend weeks in the early 1980s, not just a few days, trying to search online databases with SQL and having to seek the help of "experts" to properly format questions. And then wait for "answers" that likely as not did not address my original query because the "expert" did not understand my problem, nor my questions seeking answers to the problem, nor the answers that came back. This was before Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and various other Internet search engines opened the vast abyss of unfiltered and un-vetted online data to the unwashed masses, who imagined that they didn't need or want white coats and micron-filtered, air-conditioned rooms to communicate with computers. Fortunately, personal computers came along shortly after my initial experience with database inquires, and PCs soon spawned Google and other pretenders in college dormitories all over the country.
So, you spent three or four days with Google and came up with
nothing!? Try this search string "
arduino zigbee peer-to-peer data link" which yielded about 97,400 results for you to pursue? Go to, and read the information at,
this link first.
And what exactly were your negative search results? You didn't post
any links to the sites that offered
no useful information. If you had, instead of complaining about my "chastising" post, perhaps someone else here with more patience than I have would have responded to send you in the proper direction. Perhaps you do need to post your question elsewhere. Good luck with that. This is not intentionally a drive-by forum, where you post a quick question, get some sort of immediate answer, and then move on, never to be seen or heard from again. This forum requires a dialog, a back and forth exchange of ideas, to produce results. That's what I meant when I said we help those who help themselves.
So, you are a degreed electrical engineer who has spent most of the last thirty years rolling code, instead of wielding a soldering iron or trying out real circuits you have constructed with your own hands. If that's your bag of tea, you are still welcome here at Electronics Point, and you may even have something to contribute via software to those newbies among us who don't have a clue yet about programming. But just about everyone here is willing to learn.
When I decided to explore Arduino/Zigbee for a point-to-point data communications application, I knew absolutely NOTHING about either Arduino or Zigbee. RadioShack was still a brick-and-mortar business, so I purchased all the Arduino "stuff" I thought I might need at "going out of business, fire-sale" prices. The Zigbee shields required purchasing the RF hardware from a third-party source, but no RF circuit design on my part was necessary. It was all plug and play, or with my limited software skills, more like plug and pray.
Actually, I had off-and-on been experimenting with RF as a hobbyist since my early teenaged years. After joining the Air Force in 1963 and getting "properly" trained up as an electronics technician (a promotion, I think, from hacker-hobbyist), I obtained a Novice amateur radio license (KN8UTJ) in 1966, built a
Heathkit SB-300 ham radio receiver, and designed and built an 80m CW transmitter rig from scratch. Lots of fun and no Internet in sight yet. But there were books available, and public libraries that would loan books for free. There are lots of ways to learn, including on-the-job-training (OJT) and a college education.
After my four-year Air Force commitment was up, I let my non-renewable Novice license expire and went to work as an entry-level technician for the University of Dayton Research Institute. As a full-time employee, I was eligible for reimbursement of tuition, so I took advantage of that and, going to school part-time, graduated from the University of Dayton with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree in 1978. Working for UDRI during that period meant I received LOTS of OJT in a wide variety of disciplines. I even dabbled in embedded computers (Intel 8085 microprocessors) and rolled some code during the 1980s and 1990s. Now fast-forward to this century: divorced, retired, children out the nest and on their own... time to re-enter amateur radio and learn about the latest microprocessors!