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.)

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!

My friend Gary Goddard turned me onto Tom Igoe’s book Making Things Talk this weekend. I’ve only looked at the first chapter O’Reilly has online, but it looks like a very useful resource for the aiosphere. Gary says it basically eliminates the need for the aiosphere project, but the first chapter sugests that it is completely at the other end of the spectrum: how to use expensive and complicated hardware, with rudimentary knowledge and very high level languages, to do point-to-point communications experiments. The aiosphere, on the other hand, will create a global hardware and software architecture for networked ambient devices. Anyway, this promises to be a good read.