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

Let me be the first to say...

[koreth]

"Thank you, Timothy, for adding an explanation of what the heck ZigBee is." That was very pleasant to see.

Chipset

[winavr]

FYI: These modules uses Freescale's Zigbee chips according to Freescale's press release.

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 Is wikipedia out of date, or rfdesign overly optimistic?

Good for some, not for all

[Kyru]

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 them

[Apreche]

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.