Zigbee

Dear friends, I would like to start a discussion on ZigBee protocol for LPDR.

What do you think about it? Do you think it will be the standard de-facto in LPDR? Or it will be erased by another emerging technology?

Do you think it could be a good idea to specialize in ZigBee development?

Thanks to all

I wait for your thoughs!

Saro

Reply to
Sarouiki
Loading thread data ...

How can you expect to get useful answers to these questions?

Anybody who is part of the ZB empire will obviously tell you that the protocol is the uncontested wave of the future, and encourage you to "specialize" in ZB to help build a critical mass of developers.

Anybody who plans to specialize in ZB development will probably encourage you to look elsewhere, so that the consultant ZB developer pool remains small and lucrative.

People who know nothing about ZB mostly have nothing particularly useful to say to you.

FWIW, my opinion of ZB is roughly the same as my opinion of UPnP , with the caveat that ZB involves adding stack license fees to products that are currently HIGHLY price-sensitive. My current employer, given the products we make, is theoretically an ideal candidate for ZB, but we will not consider adding it until it is either free or customers actively demand it. Chicken and egg, since nobody will actively demand it until it has become an important standard, and it will not become an important standard until it is designed in to a significant number of devices.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

Lewin,

Great article! It roughly sums up my arguments against too complex networks on simple devices. It reminds me of someone who is working on a protocol based on XML over ethernet, to replace NMEA-0183 (marine instruments, ASCII over RS-422). As many other solutions: completely overkill. In the future, I'll direct anyone who talks about 'neat' protocol to this page.

Regards, Meindert

Reply to
Meindert Sprang

I, too, liked Lewins article and seems to sum up my feelings quite well. Adequate Simplicity is really wonderful and, gadget freak I am, I will not succumb to sensless networking of all and sundry.

I can see why I would want to log my fridge/freezer temperatures, room temperatures, outside temperatures and my home's energy consumption. I can perceieve reasons to monitor what is watched and by whom on TV and computer (by whatever route - as that keeps a protective eye on my son). However, I want that information for just my own purposes, not to have it available for anyone else to poke their noses into.

Seems to me that embedded systems have to build in a secure kernel that can keep the systems they look after safe from un-authorised prying eyes and the malicious activities (inteded or accidental) of the interfering hackers. One way to keep embedded systems secure is not to connect them to any widely accessible network.

--
********************************************************************
Paul E. Bennett ....................
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Paul E. Bennett

The discussion in the article about security seems a bit dated. Most current home networking routers these days seem to have fairly effective security with a combination of NAT and firewall features. The weakest links these days is, IMHO, the PC (Microsoft browsers, in particular) and the wireless links.

--

Phil
Reply to
Phil Short

...

Which confirmed my opinions of a lot of 'announcements' that are usually hey look a student did this great project/research lets do some PR to get more funds in.

My main response to a lot of such things is

"WHY?"

Classic examples is/was the fad to be web/internet connect appliances (washing machines, toasters, even pens), which other than "because we can" serve no useful purpose.

Unless your washing machine with its web interface is going to email you at work to say

"I cannot do the next three loads because you need to buy washing powder/liquid on the way home."

or "I have a fault and I have called out your preferred repair company, who will come on day month year, do you want to book that day off"

Of course this only of any use if the washing machine has its own attendant droids that

collect the washing (from wherever it is in the house) sort the washing loads by type load and start each wash load remove finished loads and do extra drying as necessary iron clothes that need ironing return clothes to approriate storage places.

Imagine the chances of that screwing up, especially if the cat/dog decided to sleep in one of the piles of washing waiting collection/loading/ironing!

Consider this also why does a networked printer need a default gateway set?

--
Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
    PC Services
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Paul Carpenter

Well, it WAS written in 2001 :) Actually I wrote it shortly after I got back from that dizzying bullshit UPnP session at IBM's campus in Texas. Shortly after that, our working group broke down.

This is no kind of security at all. By definition, web-accessible services have to be able to penetrate firewalls. Any service that tries to call home (e.g. a DSS receiver programmed to deliver watching statistics to home base periodically) also gets straight through those simple features.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

In the context of the article, it is orders of magnitude better. Your article seemed to be assuming that there was no barrier at all between the home network and the internet, using the horror story of windows computer sitting naked on a broadband network with (apparently) file sharing turned on.

You are correct, of course, in that simple firewalls are not adequate for securely interfacing a sophisticated home network (with lots of embedded devices) to the world at large.

--
Phil
Reply to
Phil Short

That pretty well sums up my response to LGs adds touting a refridgerator with a built in TV, Complete with people staring vacantly at the TV from stools in the kitchen.

Robert

Reply to
R Adsett

I'd add to that by saying the ZigBee community have been remarkably successful at de-emphasising the underlying 802.15.4 wireless protocol, since they can't make any money from it. You can create a low-cost 802.15.4-compliant data transport that doesn't use their code.

Jeremy Bentham Iosoft Ltd.

Reply to
Jeremy Bentham

What about finding its syslog server (if on another net) ?

--
Wil
Reply to
Wil Taphoorn

I think maybe I left out some information in that article, or assumed some things about the reader.

One of the UPnP working groups was the home router WG. One of the purposes of this WG was to establish mechanisms whereby home routers could *automatically* announce themselves to external services and establish port mappings so that external devices could *automatically* (with NO USER INTERVENTION) connect to things inside the firewall. The object was to enable users to remote-control their home appliances over the Internet without manually setting up dozens of port mappings. A secondary object was to make certain types of online games easier to code (I don't know the details there, since I wasn't in the WG, but I believe essentially this was something to make every router in the world more XBox-friendly).

This is the type of insanity I was talking about in the article when I said I was worried that users would buy "simple routers with these kinds of features". And it's the kind of feature that I would INSIST should ship factory-disabled and require explicit user intervention before it can be enabled.

Reply to
larwe

Most networked printers have not got the faintest idea about syslog, this should be directly or indirectly on the sending machine (IP address print job from) and in Windows environments they just use simple lpr protocols.

Setting a default gateway to 0.0.0.0 does not cause any problems. It is a redundant setting because they have used a 'standard' TCP/IP stack without understanding what the implications are. That is you could potentially get a printer to send details to external systems, like the classified document, internal payroll details, new product specs or contracts.

--
Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
    PC Services
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Paul Carpenter

Hi Lewin,

That was indeed a nice and concise writing.

In addition, I think that the practical range of Zigbee devices needs to be thoroughly tested. Wireless gear, even when maxing out the FCC limits will not always reach where you want it to. For example, in our house there are several fiber insulated walls. This fiber is aluminum backed so that wireless usually quits working in the garage or in certain areas of the deck. Personally I believe low bandwidth PLC is better for motes and appliances in a household. And that is or would be the main market.

Regards, Joerg

formatting link

Reply to
Joerg

couldn't even go out to the bathroom?

reminds me of the announcement of a networked microwave oven with facilities for online banking. the motivation seemed to be that the microwave contained a computer, and online banking requires a computer. and the one computer should be used for both.

Reply to
Alex Colvin

"Why?" is a very good question. One simple reason to want to connect appliances is that many of them contain clocks or clock/calendars. In the US, for example, public TV broadcasting stations transmit a Time-Of-Day data signal (see EIA-608-B if you're curious) that many modern TVs decode and use. It would be convenient if my oven, microwave oven, coffee maker, etc. all had access to that, but it's not reasonable to put a whole TV receiver inside a coffee maker (although some manufacturer has probably done it). If, instead, these devices were networked and could get the time from the TV or VCR, that would be quite handy. My car also has a clock, so wireless might be handy there.

And, no, I don't sell or design any of that stuff.

Ed

Reply to
Ed Beroset

Yes. It's so good it can serve as a torture device.

Ever observed a discussion between an curious 8-year-old and his dad? You can accurately measure the frustration tolerance of parents by counting the number of "why" question in a row they'll answer, before that old fight-or-flee instinct kicks in.

--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Broeker

The complexity level of decoding the TOD signal directly in the appliance is orders of magnitude less than the complexity of implementing a bidirectional horror like UPnP. You also avoid the need to get both the TV set and the coffee maker type approved as intentional radiators.

Look at the (low) cost of those radio-clocks that get the atomic time signal off the air, by the way.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

There LOTS of ways to do that simple task, if the companies could be bothered.

In most countries of the world there are Atomic clock radio signals as well as:-

1/ TV stations using teletext encoded time signal that displays on screen. Already used by a lot of VCR manufacturers to set clock and station ident for auto tuning. 2/ Digital Radio and TV signals in UK contain time signal as well. 3/ Digital RDS on analog RDS system has time within it. 4/ GPS is a pretty accurate time signal.

See above, if the manuafacturers were bothered they would use the existing and mainly very cheap methods to do the same. Often the cost/benefit to the *manufacturer* of increasing sales is non-existant.

Putting bloated communications in to wire up the house/office/etc.. is way too costly to acheive any benefit.

Distributed Time Of Day is at mininum a single pair transmitting 'n' pulses a second, to a short encoded data burst, with local oscillator to cover for problems.

For MANY years schools and public buildings have often used synchronised clocks on a common drive circuit to synchronise all the clocks in a building! I even remember them from my school days, mumble, mumble, mumble years ago.

A lot of the railways in the UK used synchronised clocks on a station, with local backup, referenced to MSF (Rugby Atomic Clock). Not that MSF is known for 100% uptime! That transmitter has a wonderful history, and some of the stories I have heard over the years about Rugby transmitter during WWII were interesting.

Thankfully.

--
Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
    PC Services
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Paul Carpenter

And this is a good example of overkill. Unless you live in an area with very unreliable electrical service, you rarely have to set clocks. Some of us don't even bother to reset all of them when the U.S. switches to daylight wasting time.

Reply to
Everett M. Greene

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.