Development Kits Provide Wide Range of Features to Get Zigbee Designs off the Ground

To get started on a wireless system design, engineers can turn to a wide variety of low- to moderate-cost development/evaluation boards to evaluate the functionality of the chips they are considering, as well as some of their proposed circuit subsystems that interface to a host microcontroller or serial port. The development kits span a wide range of functionality and features and also come in a broad range of prices. Some of the simpler evaluation kits sell for well under $50, while prices for the more feature-rich development boards typically start at several hundred dollars and can often cost well over $1000.

Whether designers have their goals set on a Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, GPS, or any other wireless interface, the budget-priced evaluation kits, often in the form of a USB dongle, allow designers to evaluate multiple solutions in parallel, thus affording them the ability to do direct comparisons of performance, component cost, ease of programming, and still other aspects of their design. The low-cost kits, though, are often fairly minimal subsystems and come with only the basic software to get the subsystem up and running. The higher-end development systems typically include a development board that contains a prototyping area, and a collection of software tools and drivers, protocol stacks, and other firmware to help designers get their prototypes ready with minimal delays. This article will examine some of the solutions available for ZigBee systems. However, many similar development solutions are available for other wireless standards.

With its recent purchase of Ember, a supplier of ZigBee ICs, Silicon Labs now offers the EM35x series of development kits. These kits provide all the basic tools needed to build development and test networks. Included in the kits is a debug adapter that provides connectivity across an Ethernet LAN to nodes in the developer’s network allowing remote programming and collection of time-synchronized packets and other information. Also included is a desktop network analyzer for rapid programming and network debugging of customer applications. In these development kits, Silicon Labs includes an application builder graphical tool that is used in conjunction with the application framework provided in the tool suite along with the EmberZNet PRO stack libraries. Ember AppBuilder can generate code for a ZigBee Smart Energy (ZSE), ZigBee Light Link (ZLL) or ZigBee Home Automation (HA) compliant device. Bundles of these tools and development boards are available for each of the Ember ZigBee chipsets.

Also basing their development tools around the Ember ZigBee processors, California Eastern Labs offers several development kits – a stand-alone radio system that allows designers to place the modules into the target environment and evaluate the performance on-site, and a companion development kit that works in conjunction with the stand-alone kits. Each transceiver module is soldered on a carrier board that makes it pin-for-pin compatible with the Ember development board.

CEL’s kits range from a low cost USB dongle (Figure 1) to a full MeshConnect development system.

Figure 1: A low-cost USB dongle and some software let CEL offer an inexpensive way to start evaluating a ZigBee solution.

As an example of the latter, the ZICM357P2 Evaluation Kit provides an evaluation platform for CEL's MeshConnect ZICM357P2 module, based upon Silicon Labs EM357 IC which integrates a 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4 compliant transceiver. It should be noted that the CEL ZICM357P2 kit does not include all tools necessary for a complete development environment. In addition to the ZICM357P2 (the hardware platform), a software platform is necessary. The software components needed are the ZigBee stack and a software development environment. The Ember ZigBee stack is built targeting the IAR Embedded WorkBench for ARM. Ember offers two kits, one with the bundled compiler and one without.

Also at the higher end of the spectrum, the Drop-in Networking Professional Development kit from Digi International provides a full development environment including three XBee modules (ZigBee radio transceivers), and three interface boards (1 USB and two RS-232) that can be used to simulate endpoints in a wireless personal area network (Figure 2). The modules come in the form of a small circuit board with a 20-pin DIP configuration. They offer a 250 kbit/s RF data rate and a choice of two distance ranges – the regular version has a range of up to 133 feet, while a “Pro” version that costs slightly more offers a 300-foot range for indoor/urban applications, and even longer distances in outdoor line-of-sight applications.

Figure 2: Containing multiple ZigBee radios and a gateway to a host system, the Drop-in Networking Development Kit from Digi International provides an easy-to-configure development platform.

Also included is the company’s ConnectPort X2 gateway that concentrates data from the XBee modules for connectivity to a PC or an IP network. The gateway incorporates a Python-based programming engine that designers can use to develop their own application software. Supplementing the gateway is an XBee wall router (in the mesh networking kit extension) that provides network extensions and simply plugs into a standard power outlet. The wall router also includes light and temperature sensors that can be monitored through the gateway.

Another ZigBee development solution, the ProFLEX01 development kit from Laird Embedded Wireless Solutions combines a development board and two transceiver modules with antennas, USB cables batteries, and software (Figure 3). The kit allows designers to evaluate the RF range performance at the press of a button, and with the company’s ProFLEX01 test tool, the PC-hosted software can demonstrate how simple it is to send and receive data, collect performance data, change channels, power levels or addresses using the company’s serial host control protocol running on a companion microcontroller. Both the 802.15.4 radio and the microcontroller are from Texas Instruments – the CC2520 and MSP430F5437, respectively.

Figure 3: Simple transceiver modules based on the Texas Instruments CC2520 802.15.4 radio and PC-hosted software tools are part of the ProFLEX01 development kit from Laird Embedded Wireless Solutions.

These are just a few of the tools offered by companies offering ZigBee solutions. There are many other suppliers not mentioned in this article that also provide development solutions for ZigBee as well as for BlueTooth, WiFi, GPS systems, and many simpler wireless standards using OOK, ASK, FSK, and other signaling options.