Two caveats to Dave's arguments:

(1) is that Freescale, Atmel, and Microchip are making seperate
microcontrollers from radios.  You actually have to buy two chips to
realize a mote/Zigbee solution.   The CC2430, soon to be released, is
the first single chip 802.15.4 radio/microcontroller solution.

(2) Zigbee is simply a protocol and could be implemented in TinyOS. 
Likewise, motes can run TinyOS, TinyOS with Zigbee, or embedded C with
Zigbee.  They're not constrained to any one technology.

-Joe


On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 22:59:09 -0500, David Bengtson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Dominique:
> 
> If you are serious about developing some home automation product with a
> Mote/TinyOS approach, you might want to seriously look at Zigbee.
> (www.zigbee.com) There are several companies making integrated Zigbee
> radio's with microcontrollers (Freescale, Atmel, Microchip come to
> mind), with support and app's engineer's and volume pricing.
> 
> As far as volume pricing, it's pretty reasonable that quantity 1 pricing
> for something like a development board is order's of magnitude above
> pricing for high volume production. Look at the digikey catalog, and see
> how the prices roll off. I just priced an Atmel MEGA-128
> microcontroller, and here are the prices
> 
> Quantity    Unit Price
> 1                  $15.05
> 25                $9.45
> 100              $8.75
> 
> I'd guess that if you could get a serious, competitive bid price for
> 100k/year, you'd be talking about $4.50 or so.
> 
> Also, keep in mind that you wouldn't be paying these prices from Xbow,
> you'd roll your own incorporated in whatever home automation product you
> want.
> 
> A decent target for pricing is 25  percent of you sale price is your
> material price. If you are looking to sell something for $50, then your
> material price should be no more than $12 if you want to have any hope
> of making money at this. I suspect that the $1.00 price for the Spec is
> based on a die size price only. It's a long way from where they are now
> to a real product.
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> Dominique Blas wrote:
> 
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > I'm new to tinyos and to the MOTES.
> > My goal is to develop some kind of home automation with MOTES.
> >
> > By looking for the price of a single Xbow kit (802.15.4 for example) : I
> > found this awfully expensive !
> > Berkeley claims that the latest generation mote - aka Spec - costs less
> > that $1 in quantities. Fine, really fine.
> > BUT, currently, a single MICAz module costs nearly $200 and a DOT sensor
> > more that $100 !
> >
> > Moreover the Stargate gateway (a simple PC board that costs between
> > $100 and $200 and less that $100 if you choose the VIA processor
> > family) is "offered" at nearly $3000 that is to say about 20x its price.
> >
> > Surely, it unuseful for me to try to market a product build with such
> > MOTES : I will be well beyond the target market price for the kind of
> > product I want to develop (a few dozens
> > of dollars).
> >
> > Does anyone have any suggestion ?
> >
> > db
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Tinyos-users mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://mail.Millennium.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/tinyos-users
> >
> 
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