A hardware hacker from Tokyo has been working on an open source software stack for the Zigbee wireless protocol. (The project dates back to 2008. Not sure how mature it is. The Sourceforge project page says it was updated last in April 2013.)
The Zigbee software marketplace he describes sounds a lot like the one that exits for Z-Wave, where your choices are generally either to get the software stack from the chip manufacturer under NDA, often as binary blobs, and restricted to using it only with that vendor's hardware, or you license stacks for great sums from third party commercial vendors. (OpenZwave was created to address this on the Z-Wave side.) I wasn't aware that Zigbee had these same problems. Unlike Z-Wave, Zigbee is built on an open IEEE standard. (I just never paid much attention to it with respect to the home automation marketplace, as the Zigbee standards defines a lower-layer communication protocol. Something that is far more general purpose than a home automation protocol. The down side being that if you want interoperable home automation devices, you need to define a standard protocol to run on top of Zigbee. In contrast, Z-Wave is home automation specific, and Z-Wave home automation products from different vendors know how to talk to each other.) http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/FreakZ-Open-Source-Zigbee-Stack.html One of the problems with the current state of Zigbee is that the software is either provided by semiconductor suppliers and bound to their hardware, or is proprietary and requires heavy licensing fees. This causes some major issues that I have a problem with... -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
