ZigBee

[Paulh_Boats]

ZigBee (a small wireless network) looks like the future for automation and Smart Energy:

http://zigbee.org/Markets/ZigBeeSmartEnergy/Overview.aspx

British Gas say their Smart Meters will use ZigBee to communicate with home appliances.

Severn Trent will use ZigBee in smart water meters.


Hundreds of large or significant companies have signed up to the ZigBee standard:
http://zigbee.org/About/OurMembers.aspx


I looks to me like 1-Wire and Bluetooth is doomed as a network solution - some of us should be looking at ZigBee which supports up to 65,000 nodes, Bluetooth struggles with more than 7 nodes.

ZigBee can operate on ultra-low power when devices go into sleep mode, it can be used in battery operated devices.

-Paul

[StBarnabas]

Paul
have indeed used ZigBee a few years ago but not in too much anger as the cost was prohibitive at about £30 per node. Possibly the transceivers have become a bit cheaper recently and it indeed looks very interesting particularly if suitable transceivers were available for under £5.00
Sean

[roscoe]

I too have in the distant past got a bit excited about zigbee.  Even bought and played with bits'n'peices including the tweet-a-watt and the brultech monitor.  From an engineering perspective seems like a good choice.

But, its been dragging on for years and years and never gotten very far, usual standards that never get adopted in very high volumes.  It is too expensive and different devices don't play together.  Standard zigbee range has also for me been marginal.

Given up.  Let me know if the price ever gets sorted out.

 

http://albacontrols.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/ziggin-zigbee-current-thoughts/

[wyleu]

Bit power hungry, was the last general conclusion I remember.

I pitched a ZigBee based monitoring system a fair while ago but got no joy from HMG's end.

[MarkB]

You still have the issue of powering the chips. This means either batteries or a power cable from somewhere.

Most of these devices with very low currents and long lifetimes will use Lithium cells, which are pretty horrible in almost every environmental way. Most other battery types would need frequent changing or be bulky.

If you're going to the effort of running a power cable to a sensor, then you might as well use it to communicate over. The power consumption is probably similar, but much less maintenance to worry about.

I don't think one-wire is going away anytime soon, and is the best option, in my opinion, if you have the capacity for putting in the cables and the technical bent to be able to extract and process the data. Zigbee will probably be better marketed, more (non-technical) consumer friendly and more expensive.

[wookey]

As people have said paul, Zigbee is not new, and shows no sign of ousting 1-wire for cost-sensitive applications any time soon. I wanted to use it for all the monitoring here but it was too expensive 2 years ago, and it's not got much cheaper in the meantime. It _is_ taking over the smart meter market. It's already huge there and getting bigger. In the meantime low-power bluetooth is nipping at its heels, and there is a hiuge fight on for the healthcare widget market.

I've used it in real products (Toby chruchill's  lightwriter has a jennic chip in it), and it was interesting to note that the manufacturers (Jennic) were _very_ keen for you to not use the Zigbee standard but use their proprietary 'Jennet' code instead, thereby defeating the whole point of the interoperability zibgee should give you. They emphasised that you could have their proprietary code for free, but had to pay to join the zigbee alliance to use the open stuff. Sad state of affairs.
It does have practical problems in the original protocol in that devices can only be in one network (PAN). That's OK for house sensors talking to a logging device, but what if you want to use your personal machine (e.g. phone) which is already in another pan with your personal input device, to download data from the logging device? Oh look you can't, at least not over zigbee within the zigbee protocol - you have to make something else up and then it's not standard.

The other problem is the complete dearth of things to control with it. Terrible shortage of zibgee lights, power sockets, temp sensorsm humidity sensors, especially as reasonable prices.

It is cool tech though, and it's open, which is great, and I hope it does eventually catch on, but I'm not sure it's going to fly for general sensor use. And as markB says - there is always the issue of power. The thing with wires is that wiring in an existing home is very expensive. It is hundreds of pounds cheaper for an instraller to put in something wireless. The fact that the householder has to change battereis for the next 20 yrs is not their problem. Wiring a new home is much cheaper, and the case for wireless is much less convincing there.