Hello
Have you guys ventured into looking at the Zigbee Module from MicroChip? Its called the mrf24j40. It becomes easy to program it with PIC micros.
Thanks
Ash

Hello
Have you guys ventured into looking at the Zigbee Module from MicroChip? Its called the mrf24j40. It becomes easy to program it with PIC micros.
Thanks
Ash
Florian,
I am also interested in looking at your code, if you dont mind. I have been playimg with Cc2530 for some time but i am New to Smarthingsā¦
Wojtek
@ashutosh1982 the MRF24J40 looks great! Thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, it looks like Microchipās Zigbee stack is an additional $1000
@VirTERM do you have a bitbucket handle I can add to the repository to share with you?
VirTERM .
I really appreciate it.
Yup its $995 , but if anyone is planning to build a product then its a one time investment. As long as we can make it work in a mesh environment and make it compatible with a platform like Smart Things.
Thanks for the post. This seems like what Iām hoping to do with the NXP module Iāve been playing with. Iām hoping to make a PCB based on what DIOās or ADCās I want to use, Relays, buttons, other sensors like temp/accel/piezo.
Quick question, have you figured out a good way to figure out what your Zigbee fingerprint looks like? Iāve been playing around with the NXP zigbee HA stack (free by the way!) and examples and I thought I knew what in and out clusters were being used but can never seem to get it to be auto recognized when I pair it. See my questions here.
Note that I was able to find these NXP modules for about $10 so even with a PCB and battery I was hoping to beat the $25 cost of the monoprice.com door sensor here.
The NXP module is the JN5168-001-M00.
I also started a thread here.
Thanks for sharing, thatās really cool. I have not dabbled in the whole fingerprint configuration, but noticed that it appears to match the in- out clusters I have set up on the firmware side.
I havenāt worked on this project in a while, because I am waiting for the Spark Photon to come out. It will be very difficult to beat the price, but all bets are still out on power consumption.
Hi Florian,
I also try to connect atmel bitcloud device to smartthings, The atmel HA device was able to join the smartthings network, but it didnāt show up on my phone. Can you please provide an example on how to connect to Smartthings and have it show up on my device list? Thanks!
Hi Florianz!
Any progress about your zboard?
Reviving an old thread here, since I canāt find any other progress or work thatās more recent. Iāve had success getting a cc2530 zigbee module to talk to smartthings. So far I can pair it, and blink an led, controlled by a device handler, from my phone. The good thing is, these things are small and just a few dollars!
The chip is very flexible and powerful, about like an arduino. Iām thinking it could be a thingshield replacement, and also could function on its own as a device doing simple things with the (16!) gpios and (8!) analog inputs.
Thoughts? Interested?
I know the forum is hard to search, but there is an existing project very similar to this which you will probably find interesting. There has been a lot of work done on it.
Separately, I think many people who were looking for a Thingshield replacement moved over to the ESP Wi-Fi options.
See:
Thanks for pointing me to that. Iāll reply on the first thread above and join that community.
It seems that other thread hasnāt made it easy to attach the zigbee board to an arduino, like thingshield.
The st_anything wifi solution is OK, but I think itās great to have a zigbee solution too.
See hereā¦
I left SmartThings several years ago but am still subscribed to this thread. Hopefully nobody minds if I pop in and give my $.02.
When I came over to openHAB, I wanted a way to replace the functionality of the ThingShield to connect an Arduino to openHAB. I settled on the use of MQTT to connect these devices. Itās an open protocol that is lightweight, reliable, and simple to use.
I use a WiFi shield to connect some devices via Ethernet, and used the Arduino-like Particle platform to connect wireless devices.
As SmartThings supports MQTT, this can be a great way to connect custom IoT devices to your home automation. Personally, I found MQTT much easier to figure out than the ThingShield. Plus, itās future proof: if I ever leave openHAB I can control it with node-RED, home assistant, or anything else that supports MQTT.
Hereās my best example, a toddler busy board that controls the lights in the room:
Hi everyone. Unfortunately, I am no longer developing this project: I hit a roadblock with not being able to get the RF circuit dialed in just right for range and connection stability. I lack the necessary hardware to measure the RF performance and the skills to optimize it.
Since I abandoned this project, a lot of really cheap hardware options have shown up, such as the one that @drandyhaas linked too, as well as the ESP8266 WIFI modules that are extremely popular now. If I had to do it all over again, I would probably focus on developing a SmartThings compatible software stack for one of those cheap, readily available hardware options. Folks a lot smarter than me have already figure out the hardware side of things and it would be great to build on their work instead.
There is also Wifi 6 to look forward to: In the past it was difficult to run Wifi sensor modules off a battery for months, which is relatively doable with Zigbee/ZWave. As far as I know, there is new hardware support for low-power IOT devices in Wifi 6, which has the potential of further tipping the market in favor of Wifi.