The ZigBee Open House returns to Asia. You can meet Ember and other members of the ZigBee Alliance at the event.

Following on the heels of the ZigBee PRO Feature Set and Home Automation Profiles announced in Q4-2007, the ZigBee Alliance took several more strides that pave the way for the introduction of many new products in smart metering, home automation, security and monitoring, and building automation applications in the months to come. The alliance announced:

1. Formal certification of the newest ZigBee “Golden Unit” platforms for the ZigBee PRO Feature Set, which includes Ember’s EmberZNet PRO 3.1 software platform, and silicon.

Golden Units are reference points for future ZigBee Compliant Platform (ZCP) testing, enabling other platform suppliers to now gain ZigBee PRO Feature Set certification through independent test houses such as NTS Corp. Device manufacturers need to base their systems in ZCP in order to gain formal ZigBee product certification.

Click Here to see ZigBee Announcement

2. The completion of the Smart Energy public application profile development

ZigBee Smart Energy Profile offers utility companies a global open standard for implementing secure, easy-to-use wireless Home Area Networks (HANs) for managing energy. Building upon the Home Automation Profile announced late last year, the Smart Energy Profile enables OEMs access to the rapidly expanding “green market” via standards based products that help conserve energy and preserve the environment.

For utilities, the ZigBee Smart Energy profile offers the capability to implement advanced metering, demand response, load control, time-of-use pricing and customer messaging. It will also enable OEMs to build household devices such as thermostats, lighting controls, in-home displays and smart appliances that communicate wirelessly with electricity/gas/water meters. This infrastructure enables consumers, utilities and communities to collaborate on energy management.

Click Here to see Detailed List of Features
Click Here to see ZigBee Announcement

3. Public availability of the latest ZigBee specification, initially announced in September and till now, only available to ZigBee Alliance member. Wider availability means a vast community of developers can now design low-power products based on the ZigBee standard and leverage the benefits – improved scalability, reliability and robustness - offered by the ZigBee PRO Feature Set.

Click Here to download latest ZigBee specification including the PRO Feature Set

These developments represent a crucial step in bringing to market standard based products that can have a significant impact on communities and the environment.

Building ZigBee-Certifiable Products with Ember’s AppBuilder

Ember’s family of development tools now includes the Ember AppBuilder, a new GUI-based tool that dramatically simplifies ZigBee application development, allowing customers to quickly deliver ZigBee Certified Products to market. Leveraging the standard application profile compliant applications included with EmberZNet PRO software, the AppBuilder produces fully configured application code, where the developer selects a specific HA device, specific standard clusters to be included within the device, the desired security configurations, and overall hardware configuration options. The developer then inserts their vendor-specific code associated with the device, resulting in a complete application that should be ready for integration, test and ZigBee HA product certification. Ember customers have been able to create complete, certifiable applications in minutes. The Ember AppBuilder is shipping now for the Home Automation Application Profile, and will be available soon for the new Smart Energy Profile recently announced by the Alliance.

Click Here for more information.

The ZigBee Device Object, or the ZDO, provides network management functionality for ZigBee devices. For example, finding specific devices on the network, or finding a device that is offering a particular service such as a gateway, is provided via the ZDO. Other functions the ZDO can perform are interference reporting and binding services. The ZDO is always implemented on endpoint 0. An endpoint is a logical extension defined by an application. It can be thought of a device connected to the ZigBee radio or a service provided by that networked device. It is analogous to a port in TCP.

One of the most common uses for the ZDO is to find a gateway device. Each endpoint implemented on a node has to have a Simple Descriptor established for it. The Simple Descriptor contains the endpoint number and the list of commands (or Clusters) that the endpoint supports. A Match Descriptor Request is a command sent to the ZDO in order to find a particular service to bind to. These particular command would be broadcast, which means you send it to the location 0xFFFD, which is the EMBER_RX_ON_WHEN_IDLE_BROADCAST_ADDRESS mask. Only those devices that offer that particular service respond to the broadcast.

For more information on the ZDO, see the ZigBee specification, as well as the sample application provided in Ember’s Developer kits, described in chapter 8 of the Application Developer’s Guide. The sample application contains a number of examples of sending and receiving ZDO commands.

Ember has selected NTS (National Technical Systems) to provide certification services for Ember’s platforms and software for the ZigBee standard. NTS is an authorized test laboratory selected by the ZigBee Alliance to provide qualification and certification testing, and has participated closely in the development of the certification program from the beginning. All of the following certification requirements can be tested by NTS:

• Qualification of IEEE-802.15.4 PHY requirements
• Qualification of IEEE-802.15.4 MAC requirements
• Full compliance to ZCP (ZigBee Compliant Platform) specifications, including ZigBee PRO
• Full compliance to MSP (Manufacturer Specific Profile) “Private Profile” specification
• Full compliance to Smart Energy “Public Profile” specification
• Full compliance to HA (Home Automation) “Public Profile” specification
• Testing to other public profiles as they become available

In addition, NTS can also perform wireless compliance testing to various U.S. and international standards.