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zigbee, zwave, X10 which one for what ?


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#1 Nicolas Dorier

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Posted 26 April 2011 - 05:11 PM

I've seen that there is a lot's of home automation protocol out there. The cool thing about them is that they can easily installed. I used X10 for some projects, but the reliability is really bad. Two others protocol, zigbee and zwave seems to exist, and both seems to be meshed wireless network. Both seems much more reliable than X10, and are low power consumption. My question is, why would someone would choose zigbee over zwave ? Which one is easier to program with the netduino ? What is your experience on these protocols ? Can you recommend some cool component and devices to play with it on netduino ?

#2 Chris Walker

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Posted 26 April 2011 - 09:30 PM

Hi Nicolas,

Z-Wave/Zigbee/Insteon have largely replaced X10. Insteon is SmartHome's X10 replacement and is primarily a powerline protocol.

Z-Wave and Zigbee have seen the most adoption. The struggle with Zigbee is that pretty much no one has adopter the true "home automation" standard...they mostly all have proprietary implementations.

If you go with Z-Wave (which is a semi-confidential licensed protocol), you can get products from a lot of different manufacturers. You can do basic control of a number of devices from Netduino using something like Leviton's Vizia RF RS232 Interface.

Chris

#3 teachop

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Posted 26 April 2011 - 11:52 PM

A little input on the radio side... In my case, I wanted remotes that were not on the AC power, but rather on batteries outside, a little ways from the house. So the powerline communication products are of no interest in that situation. It is pretty easy to get the Digi XBee zigbee models working on a serial port. I used RXD0/TXD0 ('duino D2 and D3) at 9600 baud. I hooked up the handshakes too but don't use them much. For the "master" coordinator, I used the Netduino Plus. For the remotes, I used XBee stand-alone (which is cool) and also the Arduino Fio, depending on the application. The Netduino is great for the coordinator because of the Ethernet - I can get at it all via a browser. Netduino isn't the right fit for the remotes due to power consumption. Each has its place. All in all, this setup works pretty nice and was fun to get going. I used the 3.3V from the Netduino header to run the coordinator XBee, and the fact that the Netduino is 3V I/O works out great. It is built on a shield protoboard - watch the module pin spacing however, it isn't 0.1" for unknown reasons, Sparkfun has a transition breakout board for fixing this. I don't use the .NET stuff on Netduino Plus! I put FreeRTOS on and just program in C mostly (out in left field as always). I hacked an open source program in Qt called cuteComm to make a custom programmer because I use Linux for my dev host. Digi has a configuration/programmer that runs on Windows.

#4 Nicolas Dorier

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Posted 27 April 2011 - 08:24 AM

If you go with Z-Wave (which is a semi-confidential licensed protocol), you can get products from a lot of different manufacturers. You can do basic control of a number of devices from Netduino using something like Leviton's Vizia RF RS232 Interface.


Thanks, it will be my next toy !

For the remotes, I used XBee stand-alone (which is cool) and also the Arduino Fio, depending on the application


What component are you using to control XBEE ?

I don't use the .NET stuff on Netduino Plus! I put FreeRTOS on and just program in C mostly (out in left field as always).


Can you tell why you do not use .NET stuff ? can you recommend resources on FreeRTOS ? (To learn how to program and install it)

For the remotes, I used XBee stand-alone (which is cool) and also the Arduino Fio, depending on the application


I'm new in electronic, forgive me if my question seems obvious. Why do you use an Ardiuno FIO instead of a Netduino Mini ?
Given the technical specs they have same power consumption to me.

#5 teachop

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Posted 27 April 2011 - 04:18 PM


What component are you using to control XBEE ?



Can you tell why you do not use .NET stuff ? can you recommend resources on FreeRTOS ? (To learn how to program and install it)



I'm new in electronic, forgive me if my question seems obvious. Why do you use an Ardiuno FIO instead of a Netduino Mini ?
Given the technical specs they have same power consumption to me.

It can be configured to wake up and report an input, so for the simple case, XBee is all by itself with a battery pack that is just 2 AA cells (it sleeps almost all the time)! For the Arduino Fio case, the mega328p gives 100% control, and is designed to run right off a LiPo battery pack.

The Arduino Fio is very much lower power consumption than the Netduino. Plus a mega328p will sleep very well. The CPU on the Netduino is not designed for low power sleeping, and the board is not designed to be particularly low power either. The Fio is. Each has a place.

I don't use the .NET stuff after I found out what the interrupt routines were actually doing (s-l-o-w) and that the development tools were a bit flakey in VirtualBox (I use Linux). For me it was easier to experiment without a .net and that has been fun. Just c language, and direct control of everything. I *DONT* recommend this for just starting out, there is no roadmap or tutorial. The .NET will be much more friendly. Once again, each has a place.

For me it has been a lot of fun to get FreeRTOS running on the board, eventually I ended up building my own support utilities, building the compiler from source, making my own hacked programmer from a Python project called "SAM-I-AM" to replace the Atmel SAM-BA, etc. This is all fun to me but obviously not the way to go if you actually have a goal other than avoiding cutting the grass!




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