Daintree, which makes expensive but powerful network analysis tools, offers a few useful Zigbee and wireless primers on their site.

• Daintree’s Getting Started guide.
• Here’s a paper about the benefits of mesh networking.
• An overview of Daintree’s commissioning tools.
• Jennic offers a good basic Zigbee primer.
• TI has a complicated Flash animation which covers a lot of ideas in the home and factory automation areas.
• RT’s article on using Zigbee to develop commercial products.
  

• OpenZB is an open source Zigbee toolset project, focussed on larger networks and the TinyOS platform.
• Using Zigbee with a Linux SLUG (as a traffic logger, etc.)

These are all great applications for the aiosphere system:

A Make magazine blog entry shows a nice gizmo that turns on an LED backlight behind a series of little pictures of friends, so the user can see at a glance who’s online. Used VB or similar.

Another Make post, this one about an ambient orb made from an ikea lamp. Notable for use of an Ethernet connection.

Another Arduino ambient orb, this one USB.

Here is video of a news feed scroller which uses a WizNet ethernet chip. Here is a PDF abstract of the project.

Here is a Stock Clock project which uses Zigbee modules, useful for looking at the overall structure of the type of system I am describing.

My understanding of Ethernet is still pretty hazy, but I did learn that a TCP packet is 20-50 bytes (typ closer to 20). So a “got data?” query, and a “no” ack, could be a total of about 50 bytes. This reduces my initial rough bw calcs by more than order of magnitude.

I have been trying to think of a simple, unversal mechanism for async data push from a driver to a device, but can’t so far find anything as simple as periodic polling of the server, from the device side. Read more

For conceptual blockbusting, inspiration, and to get your stalled creative juices flowing, I recommend the following:

• Design News’ Gadget Freak series
• Instructables
• Make Magazine
• Sparkfun
• Circuit Cellar

Gadget Freak this week featured a tiny simple PIC system which calls your cell phone when something happens in your house.  It uses dirt-simple pulse dialing (by toggling the phone line with a relay).  Of course, in the aiosphere we’d do it the hard way, by messaging a server and having a widget SMS you.  Still, very clever and very inspiring!