I remember doing a research on wireless sensor motes on offer in the market some months ago. It was incredibly difficult to find out exactly what does it mean when vendors claim that their motes are ZigBee-compliant. As usual from marketing materials, they do not tell you clearly the specs. Even datasheets mention nothing about ZigBee. It is one thing to be IEEE 802.15.4 compliant, but quite another if it is a ZigBee product. Anyway I have to look into the source code of the software that comes with these motes to figure out what exactly is implemented. To my surprise not only that there is not a ZigBee stack (well ZigBee is not supposed to be open source), the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC is not implemented. All there is is just the 802.15.4 PHY. No beacon mode for the supposedly more energy-efficient mode of operation in a star-topology, as is designed for in 802.15.4 standard. Very disappointing.

Anyway it’s good to see that some vendors stop using the term “ZigBee-compliant” to confuse people, when their products are not ZigBee, yet.

Related blog posts:

• Wireless sensor that sits behind the ear
• How ready is ZigBee?
• Open source ZigBee implementation

This is a one-day workshop targeting at the SMEs organised by WASP, a EU-funded research project. It is a first step towards engaging with SMEs, and to get interested SME representatives to learn more about wireless sensors and the potentials of Ambient Intelligence. Details about the workshop can be found here.

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• Unique Post