Simple-to-use ZigBee Hardware

An anonymous reader submits "I thought this was interesting. Up till now, ZigBee was only available as a chipset or some rudimentary modules. Now regular schmucks like me that don't want to mess with a soldering iron can use ZigBee and see if it sucks or not. These radios have a range of almost a mile and cost less than $100. Not bad since nobody else seems to offer anything like this (yet). Now I can get my laptop to communicate with some of my robotics projects without an RS-232 umbilical cord." (WikiPedia's page on ZigBee a is a good way to figure out whether this is interesting to you; in short, a low-power, medium-range radio spec for all sorts of interesting uses.)

Comments

The range is what?

[Sketch]

According to the link:

"capable of transmitting up to 0.9 miles (1.4 km) in line-of-sight conditions."

According to the wikipedia article:

"Transmission range is between 10 and 75 metres (33~246 feet)."

There is quite a bit of a difference between those two. Is wikipedia out of date, or rfdesign overly optimistic?