| Status Update - 2009-05-03 | | Print | |
| Written by Akiba | |
| Tuesday, 05 May 2009 | |
|
It's smack in the middle of Golden Week now and it's been kind of nice. Things have been quiet lately on the work front because all of Japan is basically shut down. This gave me some breathing room to work on the stack and also gave me a much needed chance to rest and get my bearings again. This weekend, I treated myself to my first massage in over a year (uhhh...a normal massage...) and the shiatsu guy was shocked at what bad condition my neck and shoulder muscles were in. Apparently, I need to take more breaks from the computer because he said my upper back and shoulder muscles were like beef jerky. I also got a chance to meet up with Vlad from WebOfThings in Akihabara. He was in Japan for a conference on localization in wireless networks and another one on pervasive computing. Hmmm...it seems like everyone is working on much cooler stuff than me. I took him on my standard tour of the cool places in Akihabara (to me) like shops that sell microcontrollers, sensors, FPGAs, process automation equipment, and other knicknacks, and of course my favorite surplus components store, Super Junk. We finally ended up at a traditional soba restaurant where we were having drinks and talking about wireless sensors. As the drinks flowed, the conversation got more intense, and finally, I think we made his girlfriend fall asleep. It was really nice to have someone to actually talk about wireless sensors with. I normally just read, write, or post news about them, but rarely have bi-directional converations on the subject. As for the stack, these past few days, I ended up knocking out a couple more clusters. Now that the groups table was finished and working, I implemented the "groups cluster". This is a cluster that's mainly used by a commissioning tool to set up the multicast groups on the nodes. The reason I wanted to implement it is because the "scenes cluster" required the groups cluster support in the ZCL. The scenes cluster allows you to create customized scenes for your home, where you can specify which lights are on, how dim they are, what temperature the thermostat is set to, etc...And because of this, the scenes cluster is needed by most of the devices in the home automation profile. So the main point is that with the groups, scenes, on/off, and dimmer clusters going, there may be some simple home automation Zigbee app examples coming soon. In fact, I'm feeling so close to having actual working hardware based on standard device profiles (home automation for now) that I've finally given in and am buying a Daintree protocol analyzer. The Microchip Zena has served me well while working on the lower layers like the MAC, NWK, APS, and AF layers, but for profile specific decoding, Daintree seems to be the way to go. Having the ability to decode my frames will serve two purposes: make it easier to debug and also make sure that my frames are formatted correctly. I'm hoping that having a tool like that will help me implement the profiles quicker, and also give me some confidence that my stack is working correctly. One of the Daintree sales people I talked to recognized me from the domain in my email address so there's a chance they might hook me up with a discount. Apparently, she checked out my site and realized how financially pathetic I am. I'm hoping that this will be one of the last major purchases I need to make. I have to maintain a safe cash cushion in case the whole dev board venture doesn't work. That's pretty much where things stand right now. I'm hoping to pause development on the clusters after a bit more testing and then move on to some actual hardware implementation. If things work out like I hope, then there may be some simple home automation devices working soon... Hits: 1048 Trackback(0)
Comments (2)
 Write comment
|
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comment form
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Huge difference (depending on the job actually, LOL)!
Was great to meet you as well, and thanks for the good times! We'll sure geeklize again soon