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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.
> Is ZigBee going to succeed ...and while you're at it, what are the winning numbers for this weekend's Powerball?
Perfectly Normal Industries
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!
No-one seems to understand the purpose of Bluetooth or Zigbee. Zigbee is designed to be low power, make once, then use until it's battery dies and for sensors. Adhoc networks for routing and low response times( I think its about 40ms instead of Bluetooth's 3seconds ish) but also low bandwidth.
It's not intended to be a Bluetooth killer. They are both great for their designed purposes. Bluetooth for rechargable peripherals and Zigbee for making a load of probes to scatter around a plant to measure temperature, humidity etc and then report back on those conditions.
Slashdot: getting more retarded by the day.
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).
interesting. i'm involved with a project right now which is based around moving "tags", if you will. We are fairly sure zigbee (or something quite similar) is the way to go, and have spoken with multiple companies whose engineers think this is doable with a little coding.
we're not in need of realtime data, a few minutes between samplings will do, but we do have a rather high tag number (thousands) requirement.
In Bob we trust.
Zigbee is for low data rate- larger range. Bluetooth is high data rate- low range. like comparing Apples and Oranges.
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.