Captain no longer relies on the transparent mode of the XBee along with
a rickety custom sentence-based data pattern. Thanks to the Bee
library, Captain uses the escaped API mode of the DigiMesh XBee
platform. Because of this, the handleRx methods have been very simple.
All they do is receive the callback data frame from Bee and directly
put it to use. Bee also verifies the checksum of incoming data,
preventing Captain from being led astray by malformed frames. Sending
data has also been drastically improved.
Another major improvement is the lack of Arduino String objects,
especially in time-critical code. Better yet, absolutely no string
concatenation which can be incredibly expensive. This is thanks to
using the XBee’s API mode.
Since the 2014 release does not include a GPS I’ve removed the code
that would normally be used to send that data. It’s unfortunate but a
good GPS is not cheap.
The actual pin-outs remain entirely intact from last year.