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As metioned here earlier..
Recently Microchip announced a Zigbee demonstration kit. Not just a marketing stunt (like other announcements seem to be), the kit is actually sold on the Microchip web store and was shipped to me in just a couple of days.
The kit contains two microcontroller boards, two RF boards, two batteries, a serial cable and a cdrom with software. The price for me was 149,- euro (about 180 USD) ex. shipment and VAT. This is cheap compared to the other options : CompXS and Freescale sell just one RF board for about that price. The kit incudes the sourcecode to the software. It is all nicely packaged.
Microchip uses the CC2420 on a separate RF board. The microcontroller and RF communicate via SPI and are connected with a exotic Samtec connector. (Samtec LST series connector). Samtec seems to be popular, it is used on the CC2020EM as well.
At this price the Microchip Kit is an ideal basis for your own applications, the RF boards alone are hard to buy at a better price.
A note on the software though, Microchip mentions the code is not completely Zigbee compliant and mesh networking is not possible. You are stuck to using one coordinator. I don't know if this will change.
A poster (below) does raise an interesting point though : What is the point of this kit from the Microchip point of view ? My guess is that Microchip wants to promote its nanoWatt microcontrollers. On board SPI, PWM and A/D conversion in addition to low power timers make these microcontrollers suitable for many potential Zigbee appliances.
posted on Tuesday, February 01, 2005 12:31 PM