Wireless Watch and LinuxDevices both report on SquidBee, an open source Zigbee mote initiative out of Spain. OpenBee is an initiative on SourceForge, but appears dead (last update 2005). MeshNetics has opened a version of its MAC layer. Mississippi Sate U offers a Zigbee subset free for personal use. Nordic and Dynastream have hardware for an alternate point-point system optimized for battery.

Nice software interface. Expensive. Kit overview.

MaxStream Zigbee solutions are a favorite of artists and experimenters.  Digikey and Mouser carry these ($22).  The dev kit is cheap ($125).  The latest ver of the modules ($35) support mesh and power down.  That dev kit costs $330.  They make USB modems ($120 Mouser) with drivers for Mac, Win and Linux.

I have been building devices and researching interface experiments for years but only stumbled onto Rob Faludi when researching other Xbee projects.  Looking at his blog archives, he’s been doing interesting things for a couple of years at least.  Wonder why I’ve not run across him till now?  He points to New Micro’s useful Xbee USB carrier, which is just the ticket for a quik Xbee-PC connection.

Rob also has been experimenting with some really cool networked objects.  Check out his slinky metronome, for example.