ARM RF stack choice?

[stuka11]

Hi Everyone,

I'm working on a RF project. We need to implement low power communication between MCU-s, where MCU-s should be able to communicate P2P, and/or form a mesh network. We prefer ARM Cortex MCU-s and Keil development tools. We have to decide which protocol and which hardware to use.

Which one to use ZigBee or 6lowpan. What about power consumption difference between those two. ZigBee has to have Coordinator Node(CN) and Router Node(RN) must be actively listening all the time, while 6lowpan doesn't require CN and RN, and isn't actively listening.

We were looking at following hardware:
- Freescale KW0x - it has great output power (+17 dBm), but doesn't have any stack implementation for it
- Freescale KW2x - higher power consumption than KW0x, and no 6lowpan implementation
- STM32w - only stm32w108hb has active status, but has RAM size to small to run COntiki, has SMAC and rf4ce support
- TI CC2538 - can run Contiki, IAR required, only Zigbee Home support which isn't compatible with other zigbee standards


The hardware should have to have output power at least +7dBm or +8 dBm, and sensitivity as big as possible.
We don't need to use hardware mentioned above or have everything integrated on one chip, but we would like to avoid more expensive solutions like xbee.
Does anyone have a suggestion which hardware and which protocol to use? Does anyone have any experience building something similar? Any information would be useful.

Thanks in advance!

[nctnico]

You are seeing things too much as one big problem. Break it up in parts! What if you take a generic Zigbee and/or 6lowpan stack and compile that using your favorite compiler with a controller which fits the bill.

[eliocor]

Ember (Silicon Labs) chips?
http://www.silabs.com/products/wireless/zigbee/Pages/default.aspx

[stuka11]

You are seeing things too much as one big problem. Break it up in parts! What if you take a generic Zigbee and/or 6lowpan stack and compile that using your favorite compiler with a controller which fits the bill.

That was the idea but we haven't find any stack that fits. There are a few like FreakZ from Freaklabs but they aren't complete or support only specific boarda. If you know any that is ready to use and can be put on any board please let me know.

[nctnico]

Then change the code to work on a different board. That should take a day at most.