'Smart Home' Networking and Remote Monitoring
Whether you need to create an "intellectual home" with dozens of various devices controlled in a centralized way, a monitoring system for your enterprise, or a network made up of alarm sensors that have autonomous power supply, the technology which will inevitably be at your shortlist is ZigBee.ZigBee is a relatively new and increasingly popular set of wireless specifications. It is primarily aimed at the creation of wireless networks which consist of monitoring and control devices. ZigBee’s advantages over competing technologies (primarily WiFi and Bluetooth) include:
- extremely low power consumption, that allows wireless chips to run on a single battery for months or even a few years
- very competitive device cost (which is significantly lower than the one for Bluetooth and WiFi chips)
- flexible network architecture, which supports star, tree and mesh (a network node maintains multiple connections to other nodes) topologies
- decent operation range(up to 76 meters), with ability to cover wider areas by using mesh connection mode
ZigBee specifications are based on IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol, and are continuously updated by a number of electronics and telecoms industry leaders, that make part of ZigBee Alliance (you can get detailed technical information here).
Our company closely follows the latest advances of this emerging technology, and is pleased to offer you ZigBee- based solutions for the deployment of:
- home automation systems
- alarm systems
- health management and patient monitoring
- any other multi-sensor networks for enterprise/business environments
Endigy has a few ZigBee- based projects already implemented (including hardware). We are using high-quality controller chips, as well as 80C51 processors from Texas Instruments to build up the network nodes and controlling infrastructure. Moreover, since the beginning of 2008, we have been developing a C++ - based framework for easy ZigBee deployment. It has recently passed the testing phase and allows to:
- use generic high-level API to read/write values to node registers
- create and manage virtual ZigBee networks. We provide a convenient GUI (C++-based on Linux, Microsoft .NET-based on Windows) with visual property editing to handle administration and design of the network in a visual way.
- auto-generate the classes corresponding to various types of nodes
- update node firmware
- control the coordinator device and auto-discover the network nodes
The framework will undoubtedly bring additional value to the ZigBee-based projects.