Zigbee: Define "Open" Standard

Please keep us updated on what you find. Zigbee looks to be lots of fun, but the protocol issue really needs to resolved, hopefully in a free and open way.

mean?

I guess it is currently only "open" for its members.

Software

And

I know there are plans and pressures to make the details public. However, "free" --if ever-- won't be fast because many member companies are expecting to take their piece of the cake since that's what they paid for (aka ROI).

PICDEM

Last time I checked it was not really ZigBee since it is not ZigBee compatible (based on a draft of the standard). Since ZB 1.0 is now out I hope they will update the code to make it ZB compliant. Also, I think Microchip is targetting the most simple ZB configurations since many of the interesting network functionality that ZB promises is missing.

Motorola also has some ZB kits and stack (Codewarrior libs - made by Figure8, IIRC). Check

am

like

If you only need a simple RF link without the burden of the ZB network layer, the 802.15.4 standard is available (PHY+DATA layer):

You can use all those 802.15.4 transceivers available out there (Chipcon, Freescale, etc.)

If you are looking for something *really* open to implement low data rate meshable WPANs, check out tinyOS at

Mature, stable, actively developed, fantastic user group and it works *today*. And no doubt it will be ZB compatible once the standard opens ;)

Regards.

-- PabloBleyerKocik /"I believed that people would become programmers pbleyer / and not need companies as much. You can see how @embedded.cl / laughable that was." -- Steve Wozniak

Open means you can get it. Apparantly, you can get it now. Hence it's "open". It sounds like you're upset about the price. That's a different issue entirely. Try getting the recipe for Coca-Cola.

$7500 is less than having a certification lab run through FCC, CE, and UL testing on a product. Based on that, I'd say that the $7500 price is probably not keeping any serious players out of Zigbee. If the price drops to something more less, that's great.

It's partly supposed to put you off. When I worked at ZWorld, the marketing / sales VP (long since chased off) was rather open about pricing our dev kits high enough to keep the hobbyists away - his rationale was that the hobbyists tended to eat up a lot of tech support time with no high-volume sales to pay for it. In my experience, he was absolutely correct at the time. Luckily, there are now online support groups where users can help each other so that the tech support people can do other things than answering the questions that hobbyists often come up with.

Not only that, but I would imagine that Zensys needs to offset their development costs somehow, and the market for Zigbee dev kits is probably somewhat limited.

Kelly

I think they say it is 'based' on an open standard, meaning 802.15.4.

At present, not at all - just try asking for the spec.

I guess the Zigbee standard will remain relatively closed, since its developers want some return on their investment.

In a sense, the open source community is part of the problem. What is the point of anyone developing a commercial Zigbee stack, if they know the open-soruce community will produce code that is free, and of equal (or higher) standard? So, the commercial developers have to keep the open-sourcers out of Zigbee, by restricting access to the specification and any products derived from it.

Prices of development kits will come down, but I guess they'll be based on pre-built Zigbee stacks, not open-sorce code. Some vendors such as CompXs already include the Zigbee code on-chip.

Allegedly the main attraction of Zigbee is just the mesh networking capability. Maybe some competition is needed; anyone interested in an open-source alternative, or are all the good mesh techniques already patented?

Jeremy Bentham Iosoft Ltd.

I havent actively looked at getting my hardware releasable, but isnt this a large point of having standards like 802.15.4? Someone else's reference gets certified and you can just stamp a part 97 label on the back and ship?

Myren