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Is Zigbee the Next Bluetooth?
bz asks: "I work for a small product development company that is considering the use of RF. Naturally, it seems that it would be easier to use a proprietary protocol rather than some of the standards on the market. We are restricted by small code space and low power. The Zigbee protocol needs more memory than we would like to give up. Naturally, if Zigbee is going to become ubiquitous, we would like to sacrifice the extra memory and jump on the bandwagon. However, if it is only going to be as popular as Bluetooth, we would prefer to pass. Is Zigbee going to succeed, or is it likely to follow along the low road that Bluetooth has already paved?"
And you speak as if Bluetooth didn't succeed at all.
Is this a joke article?
Best regards, A.C.
Maybe I just don't undertand the electronics market, but why is it " ...easier to use a proprietary protocol rather than some of the standards on the market"?
Wouldn't it be easier to use a field-tested protocol, like Bluetooth, which already has oodles of cell phones and gadgets to attach to my PC?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Bluetooth seems to be really catching on in cell phones, laptops, and PDAs. It is actually pretty unlikely that Zigbee will be as popular as Bluetooth. It is too slow for data transfer. Zigbee will mainly be seen in the embedded space. Frankly you better hope that Zigbee is the next Bluetooth. Cheap and available.
Zigbee does look like it will be easier to interface than Bluetooth though.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
42, 42, 42, 42, 42, and 42
> Is ZigBee going to succeed ...and while you're at it, what are the winning numbers for this weekend's Powerball?
Perfectly Normal Industries
Bluetooth has a class 3 that is specified at 1mW for upto a meter. I havent seen anything like that in zigbee, the atmel chip has 12mW receiving power, although I'm not sure if the bluetooth spec is while busy or average.
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It is unlikely that zigbee is going to make inroads into the consumer market at all, nevermind as much as bluetooth has done.
Zigbee will be good for connected sensor networks. I suppose eventually someone will start selling personal area networks using zigbee, but those haven't caught on yet, and I doubt zigbee is going to make any significant inroads.
The only advantage to using a standard is interoperability and cheap existing hardware/software. Since zigbee has few standards about what the devices can do and how they are to interact with each other on the application layer, then there is little or no interoperability. Sure, the lightswitch and thermostat have zigbee, but the thermostat has to understand what a lightswitch is and what it does before it can intelligently set the temperature based on the occupancy of the room (presumably based on whether the lights were just turned on).
Since there are no standards for anything but the lowest layers in zigbee, then it is only marginally better than using a proprietary standard. At best when other products come out you can flash yours to understand how to interact, but that's another step down a path that is likely to lead nowhere.
The only advantage to Zigbee is that it can be cheaper in some cases to implement - where you need a rather significant and robust network, but don't want to spend the time and money developing all the prototcols to manage such a beast. If you're doing very simple point to point communications, then zigbee isn't going to save you anything. Or, in other words, if zigbee is more expensive (chipset, code, memory, etc) to implement than another solution, pick the other solution. In some cases it'll be cheaper - when the other solution will take a year to develop and test, and you have more expensive radio components than the zigbee chipsets due to complexity.
-Adam
ZigBee is designed towards the home automation market, *not* wireless sensors. I could name half a dozen more stable and power efficient routing algorithms for WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) than this beacon crap they came up with. 802.15.4 on the other hand, is being grabbed onto thoroughly, and that's because the advantages of having a stable PHY and Packet layer for WSNs (as opposed to the current situation where various nodes even from the same people can't communicate) is enormous. The combination of a general purpose computing node + 802.15.4 hardware is a damn good idea, and one that's liable to survive for at least a while. I've spent the last few weeks messing around with a TinyOS node with 802.15.4 and porting our MAC layer onto it, and it's been a lot easier than most platforms.
(On this note, don't buy the MaxStream 802.15.4 chips, because they're non-conformant - got an official line on that from one of their engineers. They're building a 802.15.4-like proprietary protocol.)
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
I did a little research when trying to find a wireless network for my project. Zigbee is such low bandwidth, that unless they adapt the standards, it won't be very useful for much past sensor networks. Plus, you have to recalibrate the routing nodes if they move, which means it's really not adaptable for a moving environment (hence the reason we discounted it) because the bandwidth is ~32k/s and recalibration often enough to make it useful for networking drops this well below anything practical for much past small sensors.
In a word, Zigbee is cool, but right now it's too low bandwidth to be a 'Bluetooth' killer.
Not with a name like that.
Pretty Pictures!
Okay the question is, what do you want to do with them? Are you using them for something sensor based? Then go with Zigbee. Are you interested in two intelligent devices sharing data, go with Bluetooth. Ask yourself what your application is and what technologies works best for it.
Unless you are implementing this in a *really* small processor, Zigbee should fit in about anything. For example, Microchip has an royalty-free implementation of the ZigBee protocol which only needs about 32K for a coordinator and 15K for a RFD (endpoint).
I seem to remember somewhere that when Zigbee was being announced and talked about and hyped, it was always toted as a "free(r)" standard than bluetooth. Of course, that went out the window and now you need another corporate license to even think about using the technology. At least they released the spec for academic use, but its basically reverted to bluetooth levels of control.
The stacks are much smaller. 30k v. 200k. If they actually gave a license open source could use though, I'd be willing to be you'd see some amazing 10k Zigbee stacks cropping up. But no ones going to do that because the technology isnt open. I doubt any corporation is going to want to explot the 10k zigbee stack niche either-- if they do it certainly wont be pioneered by a coder.
There's an amazing market built around closed source technology. At some point though, technology just needs saturation, to be used. To develop community and support. Look at Microchip; they're a company built entirely around hobbyists and community. No one uses that stuff in industry; its either an ARM or 8051 depending on if you need processing power or low cost. The best thing Zigbee coudl've done would've been to make a standard hackers could use. Get some bleeding edge people to start pushing it up toward the chasm. We really dont know what this technology is useful for. Its basically lightweight radio i/o. We've never had this before; really, nothing standard. But no, greedy asshole corporate committee work fucks up another could-have-been technology. I predict a hundred proprietary flopped home automation systems. NEXT!
Just look at all the shit hobbyists have put web browsers on. Webservers in 1k of ram with 12k flash, &c &C. In general, I'd say that even now, corporations are rarely the trendsetters. There's always the bleeding edge pushing harder faster.
I will now laugh at our pathetic corporate world.
Myren
Zigbee is for low data rate- larger range. Bluetooth is high data rate- low range. like comparing Apples and Oranges.
The Zigbee platform, with it's low power, security, and some of the excellent mesh network stacks, lends itself well to a few markets so far. Home Automation is just one. The AMR (automatic meter readers) market is ripe for this platform. A couple of companies already have products for electric, gas, and water meters. Granted, it's very early, but the mesh network lends itself well to AMR.
There is also industrial automation. However, I've read that several proprietary mesh network companies are claiming that the interference in industrial settings is too great for the current Zigbee hardware/stack solutions.
There's another protocol out there that's targetting home automation, Z-wave. A friend that develops products in that space complained that Zigbee is somewhat bloated, and he's going the Z-wave route instead. Z-wave is from Zensys, and it may be starting out as their protocol, but to last, it will have to be somewhat open, like X10.
There is nothing wrong with comparing apples to oranges.
Please see: Apples and Oranges -- A Comparison [www.improbably.com - Annals of Improbable Research]
My Heart Is A Flower
In my view Zigbee is going to be huge. Just like Bluetooth was widely misunderstood when it made its debut (commonly asked questions were "why would I need Bluetooth when we have IEEE 802.11b?" and "how is this any better than HomeRF?"), I don't think many people "get it". With Zigbee there finally will be a standard for very low cost, low power wireless communications and a simple enough stack to enable a host of uses in home automatiion, etc.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
The nice thing about ZigBee is it connects pretty much instataeous, unlike 802.11b and BlueTooth. Basically you 'switch on' your device and it's connected - instantly.
I have a bluetooth gps reciever. I would love it to have ZigBee, i find the whole waiting for the bluetooth to connect (even if only a few seconds) a bit of a pain in the ass. Considering everything you do now on a computer 'only takes a few seconds'. It's a freakin' serial port!, it should just instantly connect!
Sure its not as wide spread as we all were told it would be, but its *nowhere* near dead.
Its adoption is making slow progress, which is normally how technologies that are in it for the long haul happen.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
TAKE OFF EVERY 'ZIGBEE'
...Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Suspendisse mi. Donec iaculis laoreet nibh. In lorem odio, bibendum nec, fermentum non, tempor et, metus. Maecenas vel arcu...
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DOING
MOVE 'ZIGBEE'
FOR GREAT JUSTICE
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
I use this on my Smartphone all the time at school to send people unsolicited "You have just been BlueJacked!" messages every time I walk past their Palm/Powerbook/Nokia phone.
The "lean-in and look around" reactions I get are SO worth it.
+++ATH0
Home automation is really cool, but how many people are going to use it?
Radio Shack has (used to?) sold the "X11" modules since the early/mid 80s... They could control lights, fans, thermostat, etc... I think they even had them intergrated into light switches, etc... And they had a module that could be programmed with a computer to automate everything... Even had something so that you could control the house from a telephone...
Sadly, this seems to have gone the way of the Dodo bird and the Clapper...
Even as far as luxury items go, the general public isn't all that interested in most of the crap that academics dream up in order to lengthen their publication list...
Wireless Sensor Networks supposedly are the "Next Great Thing", but I really don't many people using this for other than military surveilance...
Disclaimer: I am a grad student... And I'm starting to think that most of academica is wasting their time....
Its kinda humorous to think about the difficult topics in MIMO-OFDM communications, when the end result will be a teenager gabbing away on a next-generation phone, while IMing her buddies and watching streaming videos all at the same time.
Most of the micros I work with have less than 16k of flash (program) memory, and 1k of SRAM for variables and stack space is a luxury.
It's bad enough you need to use 512 byte blocks to write to MMC cards.
Cheap, robust, available wireless would be a real boon.. we have robust and available, but definately not cheap.
..don't panic