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.)

Freaklabs says that “Arch Rock’s 6LoWPAN stack is now available on the Atmel RZRAVEN board which has the Atmel AT86RF230 802.15.4 MAC on it. The 6LoWPAN stack is available as a binary image for the board and has TCP and UDP services which are accessible via a PC.”

Does this mean that someone has indeed merged the two types of stacks? Well, the app notes say that this approach does indeed eliminate the need for two protocols. But, I don’t see any way to buy this, or design it into a product. Demo only, as far as I can see.

What about the Mote system? It has come a long way. Has it come far enough to be easy and cheap for what I want to do? Here is an overview page of the open source meshworks software dev platform. There is XML gateway middleware, mote firmware, etc.

Crossbow makes motes, gateways, etc. They make a very small module for embedding, but offer no pricing. The lab-scale motes are over $100 each. The hardware gateway is $450.

Taking a closer look at these two low-cost software solutions:

uTasker

One possibility would be for me to more or less duplicate what the modules do: use an ARM processor and an ethernet-specific OS. uTasker is free to experiment with, and only $500 to buy for a product, so if it works it is a great way to go.

It has a simulator, which is very cool: I can write code for my gateway on the PC and simulate the final system. I’ll bet I could pull data in from a Zigbee system using their demo SW and then feed it to the silulator, for a complete system test?

Looking at the cost of supported micros:

• Freescale MC9S12NE64, which is $10/1, $7.50/1k at DK.
• NXP ARM chip LPC2364 which is only $8/1, $5.50/100, $5/1k. No phy, no crossover.
• Luminary Micro ARM chips (which start as low as $1.50/100 for the low end parts, look into that for other things!). Their cheapest one with Ethernet is $9/1, $7/100, $6/1k. They have MAC and PHY, and also auto crossover.

Next, look at cost of dev tools. Freescale uses CodeWarrior, but it starts to cost a lot of money at these flash sizes. They support GCC, but what platforms does it run on?

What about DHCP? Yes, it is supported.

I played around with the simulator, and looked at the docs, and I have to say that at first this seems way too complicated for me!

uP

This small-micro-optimized Ethernet stack is worth a closer look too.