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ZigBee Wireless Standard Ratified
ductormalef writes "Today, the ZigBee Alliance announced the release (pdf) of version 1.0. ZigBee is a standard for low data-rate (250kbps max) wireless personal area networks (WPANs). It utilizes the IEEE 802.15.4 hardware and MAC layers which utilize frequency bands at 898MHz, 902-928MHz, and 2.4GHz. ZigBee supports mesh networking and claims to be 'wireless control that simply works.' They claim to be a solution to everything from wireless home automation to industrial control."
I guess you could say this is...
ZIG-nigificant?
Or that we should take off every Zig?
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Just when i went out and designed my PAN around bluetooth!!!
Who do I have to blackmail to get some representation around here!?!?!?!?
must be routing their webserver traffic through one of their devices.
ZigBee supports mesh networking and claims to be 'wireless control that simply works.' They claim to be a solution to everything from wireless home automation to industrial control.
We'll see how this works. The last factory we worked in, we had to use fiber (10MB at that) because cables would have too much interference.
"They claim to be a solution to everything from wireless home automation to industrial control.""
Can they solve the "SUV drivers talking on Cellphones" problem?
"ZigBee: Wireless Control that Simply Works"
From my days in compsci classes, anything that simply works usually isn't working at all.
How can it be a "standard" when it was just released?
Putting the gas pedal on the right and the brake on the left is a standard--it is so universal that it invites no question as to its applicability.
This is not a standard yet, it is a specification. Let's get something right for once around here.
On topic remark: I can't wait for more interference from paging transmitters on 928MHz and between data devices on 2.4GHz. Oh, joy!
slashdot: A failed experiment.
with some of the worst latency you ever saw:P
While it would be cool to have location based clusters, there probably aren't very many problems they can solve because of those latency or bandwidth issues.
Wow, this comment is really pointless.
Monstar L
...if this PANs out. ZING!
No seriously, is that a PAN in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
But really folks, I'm going to have to see if I can cook up a little network of my o-*head cut off by ninja*
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
...it is doomed to failure.
A new door opens in the world of aerial communism...
Captain: Take off every 'Zig'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'Zig'.
Captain: For great justice.
intelliot
When is Halo 3 coming out?
it wants its idea back
Could this possiblly kill blue tooth? Is blue tooth the next BSD?
Evolution or ID?
Isn't Bluetooth making gains in that niche?
-R
Zigbee chips will be available for $5 in the first quarter of 2005, according to Bob Heile of the Zigbee Alliance. I had a long interview with him about Zigbee's prospects. He clearly enjoys his work.
Zigbee will be big in phones, and he reckons it's on target for 5 million units by the end of 2005.
Peter Judge. Techworld
Dilbert: "But what does it do?"
Salesman: "Woah there! You're beyond me. Here's the number for tech support!"
(BTW, I don't have the strip handy, so the quotes may be approximate.)
The CB App. What's your 20?
... or even work in the same plant with one.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
zigbee is aimed at very price sensitive markets, but has one currently fatal flaw:
you have to purchase software stacks.
most any hardware a developer buys is worthless without another huge investment in a software stack to run the standard.
some people are just using a zigbee's basic transmit/recieve functionality withotu many of the integral spec features for this reason. its like buying an 802.11 chipset that doesnt work with anything else.
the zigbee industry desperately needs to get together and release free software for a number of different micro-architectures.
myren
BAN = B asement A rea N etwork
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
All I could think is that I'm allergic to bee stings.
It's essentially a wireless networking scheme that layers on top of an independant physical platform, yet costs significant dough to get certified for. Very clever scheme. Too bad they haven't included really interesting things in their design. All it lays out is the full node/slave node/coordinator node network. It really should have things like dynamic reconfiguration of the network structure. I think it's around 7500$ to become a 'zigbee partner' and then another indeterminate amount to become zigbee compliant/certified. That doesn't even include the royalties for using the stack commercially. The underlying hardware interface however... is very interesting.
I'm also not sure I want my home devices on an unauthenticated wireless network.
A spread-frequency digital communications system is really useful (802.15.4 standard). It also doesn't have the associated royaly issues.
Ultra Wide Band will make stuff like this somewhat secondary.
WPAN.....isn't this the job of Bluetooth ? Great, not only we have HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, and PSP vs. DS, UMTS vs. WiMax, NOW we have to worry about Bluetooth versus ZigBee!!
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll happily keep my BT appliances.
I get too much interference between my shirt pockets from my slide rule tie clip! Can I get a reflector that I can add to the tape that holds my glasses together? And just where am I suppoded to put the WAN firewall?
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
MaxStream, Inc. http://www.maxstream.net/ is parterning with Freescale Semiconductor http://www.freescale.com/ to make a ZigBee module. Having a module option will make it easier, quicker and cheaper to integrate ZigBee into electronic devices. Here is an article in EE Times about it: http://http//www.commsdesign.com/news/market_news/ showArticle.jhtml?articleID=55301590/
I've worked at two places where something like Zigbee would have helped. One is monitoring energy consumption, and the other, soda consumption. It wouldn't need that much bandwidth to get out power readings or vending machine sales, but, getting the network out into the field was a huge challenge. There's plenty of places where even POTS lines aren't run.
This is my sig.
802.11 is a nice protocol, but it requires a lot of power. Bluetooth is likewise a cute protocol, but it trades power for distance: you can use low power but must be nearby, or you can use higher power but must be far away, and most Bluetooth devices cannot change what range they want.
It is this high-power-or-low-range things which makes Bluetooth a very poor choice for sensor networks, small mobile robotics, anywhere where you have largely quiet but occasionally talkative devices a long ways away from another which need that occasional burst of medium-bandwidth activity. That's what Zigbee provides. Low power, large range, quiescent modes, lots of other gizmos. It's what Bluetooth should have been.
Full text of news article here
If these are cheap, people will be silly enough to use these in phones, home door controllers, light controllers, alarms, etc.
Wonder what sort of market there will be for the corresponding "box"? And what color should it be? (yellow and black?)
Annoying neighbors? Just hook up your handy-dandy Zigbee emulator to a web page, and invite all of your friends to diddle the neighbor's burglar alarm...
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Yep. That's right. $10000 to join the alliance to get access to the spec. That's going to encourage a lot of little companies to support those little 8-bit micros that go into all the toys, white goods and other products that will make it universal. Pah.
with everyone using that frequency you'd think things would start hosing up
My company met Moto reps, they tried pushing it for our new network, but its range is pitiful. Depending upon which spec you look at 15 - 30 meters. There are some testimonials I've heard about using them in industrial settings. One guy had a problem with his network every monday morning. Turned out every monday morning, a Semi pulled between his two buildings blocking the signal. The solution? Why add a couple dummy nodes on the roof to route trafic around the truck.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Not reading the friendly article?
Insider information that contradicts the article (and the standards)?
eXtremely oblique Sarcasm?
Whose UWB is going to hit that power target? The lowest power UWB I'm aware of is Freescale's XS110, but I don't think it'll compete for the power. I think what you'd be most likely to see is zigbee turning your DVD on and off, and UWB running the video to the screen, sound to the speakers, data feed from the network, etc. (Assuming the right UWB, of course.)
front page.
...)
I didn't see anything about "jiggubii" in there. (Or musen, or seigyo,
this standard and other similar PAN standards (or at least one) will develop critical mass and gain widespread adoption.. and only then are the fatal flaws in its security protocols published in the mainstream media widely, so by then it will be too late and much fun chaos will ensue at the expense of others.
Chipcon and Motorola are both producing 2.4GHz Zigbee RFIC's now. They are fairly inexpensive, about $4.50 each in 1k qty. ZMD will be releasing 900MHz Zigbee RFIC's very soon. Licensing the stack from one of these company's partners adds about $0.50 but of course you could always roll your own.
Zigbee does have security - 128bit AES. I think it uses CBC but I'm not sure. The Chipcon CC2420 has an onboard crypto engine.
For the Zigbee chip companies that have zigbee stacks on the market now, if you want to use their stack in an end product, you pay a license fee per device, about $0.50 or so. Of course once the spec is publicly available for download (1Q05) then you could just write the dang thing yourself. For those of us that need to get to market soon, it's much easier just to license it for now.
Anyone interested in a Zigbee Stack project on SourceForge?
Already done. The Chipcon Zigbee Development kit comes with one. The Motorola DK probably does too. You can also buy one from FTE.
Zigbee adds some really cool stuff, including mesh networking, dynamic mesh creation and maintenance, security, and a very cool application profile tool.
Who says that you need to get certified? Maybe you do if you want to advertise your product as "zigbee compatible" or whatever, but if you don't care then there's no reason to test. We're using the zigbee stuff from Chipcon and we aren't a member of the Zigbee Alliance. Oh, BTW, it costs $9500 to become a member of the Alliance, not $7500.
In our office we tested for range using two of the Chipcon boards. We measured about 40m range, through various walls and offices and whatnot. That was using el cheapo PCB trace antennas. If you put on chip antennas (like what most BT devices use) then you could probably get 50m+. Outdoors, either of these options can do 100m+, one guy said they got 400m between devices.
ZigBee's strategy has always been to make the standard open (meaning available for free download on the web for noncommercial use, academic study, etc.), while remaining proprietary (meaning that one must be a member of the ZigBee Alliance to use the spec in commercial products).
You're right, IEEE 802.15.4 does not encompass any mesh routing. IEEE 802 standards cover only the PHY and MAC layers of the OSI stack, so networking is not included. However, 15.4 was designed to support such services, and their specification is one of the main functions of the ZigBee specification. The ZigBee specification describes a multihop routing protocol that has been tested in large networks on products made by multiple vendors. You won't have to write your own routing protocol.
After the Bluetooth debacle, ZigBee members were pathological in their desire for interoperability--it is one of the mantras heard at every meeting, and drove the many interoperability fests that were held in 2004. It was felt that, whatever mistakes they may make, they should at least make new mistakes--repeating the mistakes of Bluetooth would be foolish, indeed.
(BTW, I have nothing against European people, but the nature of business and politics over there is that Overdesign by Committee and overreliance on ISO type stuff is endemic (the one's most vocal about this seem to be Europeans themselves anyway)
Design by Committe gave us GSM, the A-series paper sizes and a lot of other things that made life easier here. It's not all bad.