I was just going through the paraphernalia I acquired from the Zigbee Open House in Tokyo when I came upon this little gem. Now, I think a Zigbee gas valve is an interesting product, but is it just me or does the installation description sound a little erotic?

 Just what I need to control the gas coming out of my cock!

The Zigbee Alliance announced that they're forming an "Internet Solutions Initiative" to investigate ways of integrating IP networking into Zigbee. Translation: They're forming a new IP6 group.

Looks like they've taken notice of the work thats going on over at 6LowPAN and Adam Dunkel's Contiki/uIP project . Anyone thats familiar with the Zigbee spec knows that its almost a one to one correspondence with TCP/IP. The Zigbee NWK layer is analogous to the IP layer, the NWK routing protocol, AODV, is analogous to IP's RIP or OSPF, and the Zigbee Application Framework is analogous to the TCP layer (without the TCP state machine and the weird sequence space thing). Zigbee has endpoints, TCP has ports. Zigbee has endpoint grouping, TCP has port binding. The list goes on and on.

One of the main benefits of Zigbee is that the protocol is designed for operation over wireless networks and was basically designed to fit 802.15.4. 6LowPAN on the other hand is doing double-back-handsprings-with-a-twist to get IPv6 to fit into the 802.15.4 frames.

Texas Instruments just did a press release announcing their CC2520. As some of you know, I'm using an AVR+CC2420 as my main platform, from which I'm going to branch off to other combinations. So when I heard that the CC2520 was out, I took some time to check out the datasheet to see what kind of benefit it bestows on the user versus the CC2420.

Just got back from the Zigbee Open House in Tokyo.  Overall, it was pretty interesting, although I'm proud that I was one of the few people that weren't sleeping in the audience by the end. There are a lot of things going on inside the Zigbee group and some of them are pretty exciting. Too bad that it takes a few thousand dollars to become a member.

One of the more interesting topics were the application profiles that are currently being worked on. This hasn't received a lot of press lately, but when it was explained, it sounded very interesting. The Tokyo powerpoints aren't up yet, but you can find the same PPTs here . In a nutshell, the current application profiles, either available or in progress are:

• Home Automation
• Commercial Building Automation
• Advanced Metering and Infrastructure
• Personal, Home, and Hospital Care
  
• Wireless Sensor Applications