| Status Update - 2009-04-27 | | Print | |
| Written by Akiba | |
| Monday, 27 April 2009 | |
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Thought this would be a good time to provide a status update with the news about Zigbee migrating to IP just coming out. The FreakZ stack development is going to continue as planned, although this might throw a wrench into my plans for compliance since so many things will be up in the air. Almost all of the development right now is in the Zigbee Cluster Library which will likely remain intact anyways. I'm not planning any changes to the network and application layers of the stack until they release more details about how the spec will be affected and the timeframe. I suspect that the Zigbee Alliance will have no choice but to use 6LoWPAN, and in that case, the plan will obviously be to integrate uIP and the excellent SICSLoWPAN work that's already been done by the guys at SICS and their partners. Since I'm using Contiki already, I'm not too worried about integrating the SICSLoWPAN code. I'm going to need to brush up on my TCP/IP and IPv6 though :) As for the current status of the stack, I'm just getting back into the groove of things as my life slowly returns to normal after handling all of the equipment moving and logistical issues last week. I've already tested a lot of the new ZCL functions and am also adding new clusters. I'm hoping to have the full set of general clusters implemented soon which will at least make it possible to implement a simple home automation profile. I'm also modifying a lot of the ZCL code to simplify it because I felt my previous implementation was overly complicated, especially since a lot of people will be working directly with the ZCL code as opposed to the lower layers of the stack. Golden Week starts this Wednesday in Japan and is a whole week of holiday, so that should free up some additional time for me to dedicate to the development (and maybe take some time off as well). Well, this is a short post, and the main point was just to let people know what the plans are in light of the news that was just announced. Updated 2009-04-28: Is it me or do I have a tendency to write run-on sentences... Hits: 824 Trackback(0)
Comments (5)
  written by Kevin Townsend, April 29, 2009
On a more relevant note, I'm actually pretty happy about the whole IP address change. It would be a significant argument in Zigbee's favour to me if I was a company making a decision on what to use. People are used to seeing and working with IP addresses (v.4 anyway, though I don't think v.6 will scare anyone off because of it's familiarity by association). My guess is that it can only help device/protocol adoption in the long run, even if it's bound to ruffle a few feathers in the short term, and it will probably make integration easier in certain situations. They probably have more to gain than to lose anyway.
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 written by Sherif Hanna, May 01, 2009
Ultimately, I did not understand ZigBee announcement this past week - there was no real substance. How would they use 6LoWPAN while reconciling it with the current stack definition? 6LoWPAN, IP, ROLL, etc. fundamentally replace a lot of what ZigBee has implemented already.
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 written by Akiba, May 01, 2009
Yeah, that's probably why the announcement didn't get picked up by the major news outlets like EETimes. They couldn't really figure out what it meant. It's going to be a big change, and I'm interested to see how they implement it. It's mostly due to pressure from NIST and other government bodies to standardize on IP as the protocol of choice for the front end and backhaul. That, and Zigbee vendors would lose out to IP vendors for utility bids, just because IP is a much more familiar and comfortable term
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 written by sulumits retsambew, June 04, 2009
thank you for sharing with us, your posting is great nice to read your blog
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Just look at the size of this comment, simply to share a quote that came to my mind. I need to hack my keyboard that I can only add up to 150 characters in a web textbox.