xbee 2 alternative

[Isaac]

Hi,

I'm thinking of using the xbee 2 series radios on a project/product for home automation. The main reason being that zigbee is a widely used standard and it's free, the oposite of z-wave that you have to pay loads of money to design products for their standard (also you are limited with just a few supliers os the hardware needed). My initial choice was to use xbee 2 series modules because they are very easy to use with any MCU since it has a very simple communication protocol between the radio and the MCU. The problem is that those things are very expensive and just one of those is more than a third of the BOM's cost in prototyping quantities. Well, searching on Digikey and other suppliers, it seems that the xbees don't have any price break for volume (just $17.5). It's not hard to conclude that the final model of my project/product would have a BOM which 90% of the cost would be just for the Xbee. Does someone knows any substitute for the Xbee radios that has all the features for zigbee protocol, including mesh routing buit-in as well as ease of use?

Thanks.

[Isaac]

At least, if not so plug and play, is there some firmware available on the net that does mesh routing on zigbee pro standard...

[Maxlor]

I've recently found myself investigating a similar problem. The cheapest option for doing wireless MCU communication was the MRF24J40 chip from Microchip, and the MRF24J40MA module (which includes chip, antenna and the passive components to make it work). Not the most efficient chip as far as power usage, but the cheapest by far at $9.

The hardware by itself is a 802.15.4 module (which is not exactly Zigbee, but the protocol layer underneath it and a number of similar protocols.) I think Microchip offer both a MiWi as well as Zigbee stack for it for free, if you use a PIC controller. Can't really say how easy the software is to use, since for my project it was enough to just use bare 802.15.4 messages.

[Isaac]

I looked for this MRF24J40 from Microship. I gave up because I could not find any info about how to get protocol layers into my application without writing the protocol from scratch, which is time consuming and really really hard... The protocol stack layer for the Zigbee Pro is not for free... http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/technology/personalareanetworks/technology/zigbeesmartenergy.html

On the other hand, MiWi could be what i was looking for, maybe, since it's free and has no royalties... 

http://mobiledevdesign.com/technologies/zigbee-protocol-platform-offers-total-solution