XBee, ZigBee and so many standards

Developer's Corner General Dev Discussions
1

Hello togehter,

I want to enable Vera with ZigBee capabilities and at the moment I cant figure out what kind of communication mode I have to use. I developed a device (I’ll tell you what it is, when it’s done) which will use a XBee for communication.
XBee offers two modes AT and API and I don’t know which one to choose. I want to make it compatible to the HomeAutomation Profile so it can interoperate with other devices too (maybe :))

Long story short: Does anyone of you has experience with or knowledge about XBee devices and the ZigBee HomeAutomation standard?

best regards,
Ted

2

Hi Ted.

Maybe you can find someone here: http://www.domoticaforum.eu/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=52

Regards
Morten

3

Hey Morten, thanks for the hint!
I found some detailed documentation on Xbees and how the ZigBee stack is embedded.
I dived into the frame structure and it was easier than expected :slight_smile:

4

@Ted, did you work out whether you can use the AT mode vs the [raw] API mode to communicate with Regular ZigBee devices?

ie. XBee → ZigBee (light switches and so forth)

Given your using XBee’s, I’m assuming your running the XBEE ZB firmware releases also, since there appears to be some sort of difference between the XBee Series 2.5’s and the XBee ZB (although you can firmware upgrade one to the other type)

So far I can’t seem to find much [public] Doco on the details of Zigbee enabled devices and how the app layer chats. It would be handy to be able to chat to the Power Line monitoring devices (like the TED 5000) over their ZigBee interfaces, instead of their wired interfaces, but documentation is extremely scant for doing anything of this sort.

I’m also hoping it can all be done with the AT commands, since it’s a little simpler than going down to API mode in these things.