ZigBee Development Board

Wiki Projects & Stories
#41

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

1 Like
#42

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

#43

@ashutosh1982 the MRF24J40 looks great! Thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, it looks like Microchipā€™s Zigbee stack is an additional $1000 :frowning:

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

#44

VirTERM .:wink:
I really appreciate it.

#45

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.

#46

Thanks for the post. This seems like what Iā€™m hoping to do with the NXP module Iā€™ve been playing with. Iā€™m hoping to make a PCB based on what DIOā€™s or ADCā€™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? Iā€™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.

2 Likes
#47

Thanks for sharing, thatā€™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 havenā€™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.

#48

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 didnā€™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!

#49

Hi Florianz!
Any progress about your zboard?

#51

Reviving an old thread here, since I canā€™t find any other progress or work thatā€™s more recent. Iā€™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. Iā€™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?

20191230_093509
20191230_0935091080Ɨ1307 279 KB

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#52

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:

1 Like
#53

Thanks for pointing me to that. Iā€™ll reply on the first thread above and join that community.
It seems that other thread hasnā€™t made it easy to attach the zigbee board to an arduino, like thingshield.
The st_anything wifi solution is OK, but I think itā€™s great to have a zigbee solution too.

2 Likes
#54

See hereā€¦

#55

I left SmartThings several years ago but am still subscribed to this thread. Hopefully nobody minds if I pop in and give my $.02. :blush:

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

Hereā€™s my best example, a toddler busy board that controls the lights in the room:

1 Like
#56

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.