| FreakZ Open Source Zigbee Stack | | Print | |
| Written by Akiba | |
| Tuesday, 18 November 2008 | |
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Background: Zigbee is a low-power, low-cost, wireless sensor networking protocol defined by the Zigbee Alliance. The protocol was designed for low data rate wireless networks to facilitate automation and monitoring for applications such as home/building/HVAC automation, industrial control, farming, patient monitoring, and many other applications that could take advantage of low cost wireless communication and don't have a high data rate requirement. Motivation: One of the problems with the current state of Zigbee is that the software is either provided by semiconductor suppliers and bound to their hardware, or is proprietary and requires heavy licensing fees. This causes some major issues that I have a problem with: 1) It's very difficult for individual electronics enthusiasts to create their own Zigbee designs since they usually cannot afford the licensing fees or the costs of the proprietary tools (compilers, debuggers, etc) associated with developing a Zigbee application. In many cases, some of the most innovative creations come from individual enthusiasts or people with specific domain knowledge that might not be addressed by software or semiconductor vendors. I'm hoping that having a free stack with full source code access will allow people the freedom to create interesting things and hopefully create projects that can improve other people's lives. 2) It's almost impossible to mix and match hardware to optimize an application. Some designs are limited to using an ARM microcontroller since it may be part of an SOC that's needed for a specific application, ie: MP3 or video decoding. However the application would benefit from the addition of wireless communications. There currently isn't an easy way to take an MCU such as an ARM based one and mix it with an 802.15.4 radio from a different vendor to make a Zigbee application. This is because the Zigbee software given away by semiconductor vendors is either in binary form or contains a license clause which only permits the use of the software with their hardware. Software companies selling proprietary stacks usually charge stack licensing fees that can go upwards of $50k and also require fees for driver modification for specific MCUs. One of the goals of this project is to provide a free Zigbee stack which will give designer's flexibility in choosing their components with no proprietary lock-in. Download: The FreakZ Zigbee stack is an open source stack that is currently under development. The latest source code can be downloaded at SourceForge at the following address: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/freakz The source can also be downloaded from the SourceForge Subversion repository here: https://freakz.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/freakz You can browse the documentation in html format from the following link: http://www.freaklabs.org/freakz/v0_75/html/index.html You can download the FreakZ Simulator and USB Hardware Command Line Interface here: http://www.freaklabs.org/freakz/v0_75/FreakZ Simulator Interface.pdf
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Comments (17)
  written by arnold cahn, April 12, 2009
hello, i'd like to thank you for the amazing job you are doing. I hope to be able to test your zigbee stack soon.
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 written by Akiba, April 12, 2009
Thanks! It's taking a lot longer than I expected because of the documentation, testing, and bug fixes. But it's also much more interesting than I expected it to be.
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 written by Geoff, April 26, 2009
hey what development tools are you using Akiba? Visual studio? or something else?
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written by Akiba, April 26, 2009
Ha ha ha...wouldn't touch Visual Studio for embedded development, although it's a great IDE for Windows Application dev. I mostly use Slickedit which is a text editor with a lot of extra features and can integrate GCC into its build function. It's a commercial text editor though, and I think that Eclipse is probably just as good or better. I just haven't had the time to play with it too much.
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 written by DivineBlade, May 26, 2009
Hi Akiba....great job with the open source zigbee stack......I have a question though......Is the FreakZ stack Zigbee certified??....
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written by Akiba, May 26, 2009
The stack is not yet certified. I'm hoping to get it certified this year.
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 written by Eugene Izmailov, July 10, 2009
You started a Great project. But I have a question. Does it possible to use your stack in projects based on Keil uVision IDE for X51 or ARM MCUs with using RTOS like RTX51 ? Thanks.
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written by Akiba, July 10, 2009
It would take a lot of porting to get it running inside RTX51. The FreakZ stack currently uses Contiki for its OS services.
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 written by liu, August 04, 2009 Does it possible to port your stack to CC2430? I have some CC2430EM module and I want to use the stack with them 
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written by Akiba, August 05, 2009
It currently doesn't support the CC2430. I would need to port it to either IAR or Keil which I don't really have access to at the moment. I'm planning on initially porting the stack to MCU architectures that are supported by GCC.
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 written by Michael Stoops, August 06, 2009
Akiba,
Why did you choose to take this on full-time? Is it because you believe so passionately in the cause? You think it's your golden opportunity to make a name for yourself? Just curious. report abuse
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written by Akiba, August 06, 2009
It's because I wanted an opportunity to use up all my savings and this kind of came along.
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 written by Edward, August 10, 2009
Greate job, Akiba. Is the stack free for both personal and comercial usage? What license is it released upon?
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written by Akiba, August 10, 2009
It's licensed under BSD with the additional requirement that it's subject to the IP restrictions in the Zigbee specification. That last part was added because Zigbee has a membership requirement clause in the spec if you want to use the protocol.
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 written by Anon, October 14, 2009
As to your last point re: membership requirement, does this mean that by using your stack, the user is still required to be a Zigbee Alliance member (adopter?).
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written by Akiba, October 14, 2009
No. Using the stack does not require membership. However the Zigbee spec states that sale of any products using Zigbee IP requires membership in the Zigbee Alliance. This condition was what caused controversy on the stack's eligibility to use the GPL. Since I was already considering using Modified BSD, I decided to switch the license to avoid any problems in the future. I added the additional condition that the stack was based on the Zigbee spec and subject to the conditions outlined in it because I wanted people to be aware that there were conditions attached to basing a product on the Zigbee specification. I don't care for promoting Zigbee membership.
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 written by dyan, October 20, 2009
Awesome effort Akiba, I am working on Zigbee, and infact, i attempted to design a sniffer as well using the stack from one of the vendors, but very strangely, i keep missing messages, atleast 10% of over the air traffic...and its random...i can never predict which msg i miss..
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