The Bees (XBees) are a buzzing.

With the help of Brultech support, the Etherbee is now communicating with my IP network (yea!) picking up it's IP address via DHCP now. My next step is to bring up the Wireless ECM-1240. Later I'll add the second ECM after I set it up for the XBee. I'm also wondering if the Etherbee can communicate with other XBees, like the ones in my XBee thermostats. I guess we'll find out a bit later. I'll need to break out my Bus Pirate and see what it can do. But first a working test bed is needed before I attempt to add the ECMs to the crawlspace. In the future I may replace the Etherbee with a Raspberry Pi and a wireless dongle but that's a ways off for now.

Meanwhile on the software front, I've paused most coding while I read a few books on TDD. I'm reading 2 different books, the first "Testable Javascript" by Mark Ethan Trostler and "Test Driven Web Development with Python" by Harry Percival. The first has my head spinning with all the different tools for automated testing and for doing unit tests. I'm getting a better grasp of TDD from the second but I'm not done with either books so I can't judge the books yet. I've finished reading Pedro Teixeira's "Professional Node.js: Building Javascript Based Scalable Software". I found this book very helpful towards getting a better grasp on Node.js and asynchronous programming. I was even able to apply some of the information while reading the book. I'll be revisiting this book as I do more work on my Node.js Irrigation setup. Yes, I recommend this book. I have several other books I have to read (more on testing and automation) and other subjects I think I need for my career.