At this point, I'm not familiar with any available single chip solutions for Zigbee. I'm sure that Joe has a better handle on the Zigbee market than I do.
If the marketing guys fevered predictions of billions of Zigbee system's comes true, then I would expect that all the vendor's would make the effort to integrate the radio and the microcontroller. That is a lot of work, not necessarily from a design POV, but from a debugging/making it work POV. For high volume production though, it removes the cost of a package, which adds up.
Also, Luxoft Labs has written a Zigbee MAC running under NesC, (http://www.tinyos.net/scoop/story/2004/7/26/85256/9271), which may be interesting. I don't know anything else about this.
Dave
Joe Polastre wrote:
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
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