ZigBee Development Board

ashutosh1982 · January 7, 2015, 3:03am

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

VirTERM · January 18, 2015, 3:23am

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 Smarthings…
Wojtek

florianz · January 20, 2015, 9:07pm

@ashutosh1982 the MRF24J40 looks great! Thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, it looks like Microchip’s Zigbee stack is an additional $1000

@VirTERM do you have a bitbucket handle I can add to the repository to share with you?

VirTERM · January 20, 2015, 9:34pm

VirTERM .
I really appreciate it.

ashutosh1982 · January 20, 2015, 10:58pm

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.

eradicatore · February 11, 2015, 5:31am

Thanks for the post. This seems like what I’m hoping to do with the NXP module I’ve been playing with. I’m hoping to make a PCB based on what DIO’s or ADC’s 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? I’ve 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.

florianz · February 11, 2015, 6:44pm

Thanks for sharing, that’s 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 haven’t 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.

shanzhang713 · February 25, 2015, 3:51am

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 didn’t 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!

p1x · February 25, 2016, 9:48am

Hi Florianz!
Any progress about your zboard?

drandyhaas · December 30, 2019, 3:36pm

Reviving an old thread here, since I can’t find any other progress or work that’s more recent. I’ve 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. I’m 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?

JDRoberts · December 30, 2019, 4:30pm

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.

Another Zigbee Repeater Solution (With Temperature, Humidity, Pressure and Light sensors) Projects & Stories

Update 12/2/2018, battery backup support. Here Update 8/19/2018. It is expandable now. See it here. Update 5/6/2018 here. This update incorporate temperature, humidity, pressure and light sensor. These sensors (Bosch BME280 and TEMT6000) are probably the most accurate sensor available. Update 6/19/2018 Xiaomi devices compatibility here. I have chance to pair a Xiaomi Aqara Motion Sensor. So far, I do not see any drop out on the Xiaomi devices. Original: I need for a Zigbee repeater. I am aware of existing solution here. I thought that it would be a fun project to find another low cost solution which help your pockets. I start to look at ebay and found a lot of TI CC2530 based module. These are very robust and mature modules. I made myself a board and ordered a few of the…

Separately, I think many people who were looking for a Thingshield replacement moved over to the ESP Wi-Fi options.

See:

[RELEASE] ST_Anything v2.9.7 - Arduino/ESP8266/ESP32 to ST via ThingShield, Ethernet, or WiFi Projects & Stories

ST_Anything allows you to integrate a custom Arduino or ESP8266 device with SmartThings by editing only 1 Arduino sketch file! No groovy programming skills are required! You simply decide what devices/sensors are attached to each pin of your Arduino, ESP8266, ESP32 and ST_Anything handles the rest for you! Numerous example sketches are included to help get you started. [v2.9.7] Minor changes to IS_Button device [ v2.9.6] Added support for Arduino NANO 33 IoT (thanks @Corey_Spears1!) [ v2.9.5] Added support for MKR1010, Arduino 1.8.9, ESP8266 v2.5.2, updated numerous libraries, etc… [ v2.9.4] Added support for the SHT31 (temp, humid) I2C sensor [ v2.9.3] Significant enhancements to the EX_Servo class and Child Device Handler - Thanks Jeff Albers! ALso, an attempt to prevent duplicat…

drandyhaas · December 30, 2019, 4:54pm

Thanks for pointing me to that. I’ll reply on the first thread above and join that community.
It seems that other thread hasn’t made it easy to attach the zigbee board to an arduino, like thingshield.
The st_anything wifi solution is OK, but I think it’s great to have a zigbee solution too.

drandyhaas · January 5, 2020, 9:31am

See here…

Thingshield replacement solution for about $15 - can connect smartthings to arduino again over zigbee! Devices & Integrations

If you recall the old Thingshield, it was an arduino shield that let you connect your arduino project to smartthings, over zigbee. It makes for endless possibilities, allowing you to create any zigbee device you like, very simply. Unfortunately, smartthings stopped making the Thingshield a few years ago. I believe I now have a replacement, based on the cc2530 zigbee chip from TI. It can pass 16 character strings to/from a smartthings device handler to/from the cc2530 device, which then passes the strings to/from a simple serial port that you can connect to 2 pins on your arduino (or anything else, like even a computer with a usb -serial adapter). That’s basically all the Thingshield did. On top of that, it can also have some functionality without being attached to an arduino (or any othe…

dome · January 9, 2020, 4:57am

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. It’s 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, it’s future proof: if I ever leave openHAB I can control it with node-RED, home assistant, or anything else that supports MQTT.

Here’s my best example, a toddler busy board that controls the lights in the room:

florianz · January 13, 2020, 11:11pm

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.