Slashdot Mirror
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.)
"Thank you, Timothy, for adding an explanation of what the heck ZigBee is." That was very pleasant to see.
That device doesn't look small to me, and I suspect it isn't very low power or cheap either.
If ZigBee wants to compete with X10 and Bluetooth, it needs thumbnail sized modules costing a few bucks each.
FYI: These modules uses Freescale's Zigbee chips according to Freescale's press release.
"No soldering required!"
What you say?
"$100!"
At that price, even if I don't know what I doing, move ZigBee!
That's one are I think ZigBee can be very successful. X10 works, but has less than stellar reliability. RadioRA (Lutron I beleive) and the others are properitry and can be quite expensive. Conversely, "anybody" can make a ZigBee compliant device and it should work with any other ZigBee device--even from another manufacturers. This should help to keep ZigBee home automation devices price competitive--at least I hope so.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
what is it? im afraid to run it.
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 Is wikipedia out of date, or rfdesign overly optimistic?
-- OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.com
I'd love to put my Linux box at home on a serial console, but I just haven't been inspired to run the cable I need to do it. If I could just drop the other end of these little radios on whatever machine I want to access to console, that would be great.
Has anyone gotten serial consoles working over the radio?
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
We are working on putting Zigbee modules into devices where I work. The real benefit of them is the power consumption. They are meant to sleep 99% of the time they are out there, only waking up if they have to send data or to check if their host device wants to bug them. The devices these would go in are the kind you put out and forget about, maybe changing batteries every few months.
The biggest problem right now though is that the technology is still rather young and it's not implemented uniformly. One company might have a chip that runs completely differently from the next company.
If you can find a chipset that you are happy with though, 802.15.4 and Zigbee work well for low power, low data style transfers, but be prepared to have to fiddle with 'em to get exactly what you want.
I've used these and Aerocomm at a previous job. They rule, I really wonder why it's not more popular. If you're doing any sort of electronics project with a remote control or a serial cable or anything like that, just use Zigbee instead. It's easy and worth it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
ZigBee is a published specification set of high level communication protocols...designed to be simpler and cheaper than other WPANs such as Bluetooth.
Especially thos where you only have two weeks and a $100 budget...
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
This site has quite a range of wireless communications modules: http://www.sparkfun.com/shop/index.php?shop=1&cart =354104&cat=62&
Coin-size transceivers for $20. There's also Bluetooth modules in case you want to roll your own Bluetooth thingamajig.
i was replying to another post that got modded away after i replied to it.3 2&cid=13216485
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1577
its a weird one, bunch of numbers.
This looks like it would be an ideal communication method for swarm robotics, or a wing of drone aircraft (robot flocking anyone?).
Fun!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
This isnt for wireless networking, but wireless data transmission, a la RS-232. 250kbps is fast enough to handle anything that's ever going to come out of your serial port.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I'm all for slashdoting of intresting stuff, but simply because they put out an all in one module doesnt make this very exciting. Why is there front page cover of a post that is basically trying to sell these items?
I for one, dont welcome our new corporate overlords.
snowulf.com
Yeah, if only something like this existed.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Something with 100 Mbps and 6-10 km radius without having LOS would be a dream. One could build a cellular network out of such gadgets, to create free and libré networking for urban areas.
Think: what if every television set would have a transceiver inside it, and those transceivers formed an ad-hoc network and...
I do not moderate.
No wonder geeks have such consistantly bad haircuts!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The committee want $$$ to get the *spec*. How much they want for conformance testing is anyone's guess.
If they want this to become widespread they need to get little innovative companies on board and ordinary experimenters. Paying several thousand dollars for a document is not a good start.
K.
This is actually aimed at a whole different set of products. This is aimed at home/industrial automation not "fat pipe" issues a like wireless lans. This (like slightly more establised z-wave) are meant for simple wireless control systems. I use z-wave at home (very similar) for my home automation system. Mixing z-wave light switches and (currently) wired motion sensors my automation computer can automatically sense when I enter or leave a room and turn lights on/off.
These applications just need a tiny pipe. I forget the exact specs of the communication but its something like a few bytes (just telling a module to turn on/off/dim/etc). One big advantage is power. These things require VERY little power. They also for a wireless mesh network so if my computer cannot directly communicate with a module (big metal object blocking the transmission or just out of range) other modules can relay the command to the module I'm trying to control. Pretty cool stuff, but yeah in NO WAY meant for use like broadband.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Do these modules really "cost less than $100?"
n t-kit.php.
o duct&lstdispproductid=690992&e_categoryid=283&e_pc odeid=62607
Digging around the MaxStream.net site lead me to this page:
http://www.maxstream.net/products/order-developme
It looks like the lowest costing kit is $149. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, if anyone wants to know where they can purchase a Zigbee transceiver module for $79.95, you can buy them here:
http://www.mouser.com/index.cfm?handler=displaypr
I just purchased a pair of these for a senior design project I'm working on.
A colleague of mine is working on this and could probably answer most of the questions. Unfortunately he's just left to go travelling for 3 weeks. Please schedule the repost for at least 3 weeks time. :)
Ditto parent's comments about target audiance is home automation ... I've used X10 for my christmas lights (which is really just another power control application) but z-wave is one of the technologies I'm looking at migrating too - just wish they were as mature/common/cheap/etc. as X10.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Check out http://www.maxstream.net/
This technology seems perfect for implementing a 'Star Trek' type 'Computer, please locate Mr. Spock' technology.'
There is not a day that goes by that I don't wish that I had a real-time in-the-building locator system so I could find a particular person.
Privacy advocates, prepare your mod points for flaming now...
Something else to cause us 900 MHz WISPs headaches.
The smartest man in the whole, wide world really don't know that much. - Mose Allison
I've been looking for all this stuff for a looong time. Most other places sell it at three times the price.
First, the outdoor, Line-of-Sight spec is 4000', or slightly over 1km. That doesn't jive w/ the RF performance specs of 100mW EIRP and -100dBm sensitivity, which should be a 10km LOS distance @ 2.4GHz (for the math geeks: Transmit Power (Ptx) - Sensitivity(Prx) = Max Path Loss(Lp). Path Loss(Lp) = 32.44 + 20log10(F(MHz)*D(km)). Do that math and they should be 9.9km). So somewhere they're claiming a false spec, or they're leaving 20dB of path margin to account for rain fade, etc, but I've never known an RF manufacturer to claim less than the best possible, never-really-achivable spec.
Second, that's outdoor LOS. Most of us will never have LOS for a km or beyond. A few applications can have that, but those are usually fixed-site applications where you can put higer gain antennas anyway so distances can go even farther. Most people would use this for indoor communications, which reduces the range considerably, although their 300' indoor range sounds realistic. But why, oh why, would you bother to use ZigBee when these things draw far more current than existing 900MHz and 2.4GHz radios from other vendors.
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcServic e=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1406&dDocName=en021925
Around £140 for two nodes if memory serves. I'm not sure I'm that impressed with the state of the stack at the moment, but it serves if you want to have a play.
Take a couple of these and a fist full of transitors
(linear amp) and it will communicate well over a mile.
http://www.rentron.com/remote_control/TWS-434.htm
Got Code?
For example, here's a company that seems to be furthering the ZigBee movement along the Zigbee (and Slashdot?) ideals: "a GNU open source development tool chain allow rapid porting of your C or C++ code to AMD's Au1000 processor". I'm surprised they used AMD and not a Transmeta processor, however, which is even more power-efficient, because that's supposedly one of the best things about Zigbee: you can have a tiny little Zigbee chip for which you only have to change the battery once a year or so.
"A man with one watch knows what time it is.
A man with two watches is never sure."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A true Zigbee device must be tested for inter-operable conformance to an agreed 'profile', but so far only one profile has been created (for lamp/switch nodes). It is estimated that a new profile takes at least 6 months to create, so many manufacturers are jumping the gun and launching products which use the underlying 802.15.4 data transport, plus a proprietary application layer, as it is much quicker and cheaper than using the standard.
However, these manufacturers want to take advantage of the marketing hype surrounding the standard, so have coined the term 'Zigbee ready' to cover these non-standard devices. A neat marketing trick, which works well; for example, it has persuaded Slashdotters to publicise this unit, despite it being similar to other serial-to-wireless adaptors on the market.
What the hell is your problem?
You're going to yell at me for being wrong, and then correct me with a reiteration of what I said?
Pfft
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I fail to see why you think that information about radio experimentation is offtopic to a discussion about radio experimentation.
The water supply to my parent's house is a well,and they are restrictive with water usage, especially in the summer, in order not to risk that the well becomes emptied (because if it does then one gets air into the pipe which then must be removed (by pumping water (from somewhere else) from the end of the pipe back into the well)).
My idea is that it would be very nice to have a water level meter in the well so that my parents could read exactly out how much water there is left in the well from within the house. It is not practically possible to have wires between the house and the well, so that implies wireless. I guess the distance is about 200 meters, with some trees inbetween.
The bandwidth required for this should be negligible and one-way communication would also probably be sufficient. Current consumption is not critical because I could use an old car battery or something like that. The challenges will be price, range, low operating temperature/out door robustness and my time.
Does anyone have any ideas/tips?
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
this post sounds like some poorly written PR.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Zigbee was motivated largely by a need for simplicity and low power in comparison to Bluetooth. But it still looks like a fair bit of work to implement the software stack - not likely to fit comfortably in a tiny micro with only a KB or two of flash. The module linked to from the summary looks like it would take away this problem, but it's huge compared to the hardware I'd want to use it with. I'm hoping this will shrink down to chip size soon, like some of the hardware USB bridge chips that are available now.
There's another interesting new protocol around that is even simpler called ANT. It's proprietary and the only implementation I know of at the moment is the Nordic nRF24AP1 chip, but there's full data available on the thisisant web site. It's so simple that I was able to read and understand the protocol document in one sitting. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some of these because they look perfect for home made hardware - they're tiny (5mm x 5mm), will work with cheap 8 bit micro's, and the software won't be too complicated.
I was interested to see this link since I've had in mind for a while a project to make a very low rate two way data messaging pair of radios that I could use while rock climbing. I find the existing solutions of voice radios suboptimal and sometimes they don't work even with a separation of 50 m if your line of sight has a bunch of rock in the way. I was thinking a bit rate on the order of 100 to 1000 bps would be plenty and would allow for such a large Eb/No that I could probably close a link even with a huge path attenuation using a single double AA battery device. I would definitely want to use an unlicensed band, and I imagine the lower frequency the better to curve around the rock somewhat.
I read the Wikipedia article, and I see the lowest rate/lowest freq solution of 20 kbit/s in the 868 MHz band isn't that far off from what I was thinking of. Does anyone think this protocol is a good choice for a low power 2 way messaging project? Or is there too much overhead from trying to solve something more complicated (beacons and other tricks).
Dara Parsavand
Very informative real world example for us non-hardware geeks (yeah, some of us actually exist, heh).
I8-D
Sometimes when a Wikipedia article is linked to from Slashdot, it immediately fills up with pictures of penises and other such nonsense. This fortunately has not happened this time.
I have a suggestion: When linking to Wikipedia in a Slashdot article, link directly to the latest revision by clicking on History and copying the topmost timestamp link. That way, incoming Slashdotters will see a safe version of the version of the article, and more importantly there will be less incentive for the vandals to do their thing, as the majority of Slashdot visitors will not see their fine craftsmanship.
vernjake, could you provide a link with prices? The only page I can find with prices is http://www.maxstream.net/products/order-developmen t-kit.php and all of the products are over $100. Please clarify.