Posted by Chris Irwin
on 07/12/2011
Have you heard about this yet? The ZigBee wireless protocol? If you haven’t, no worries, some company will announce how they’ve harnessed the latest and greatest use of ZigBee to make their product save YOU money in the near future.
So what is it? To be short, it’s a protocol that creates its own mesh network. There is a gateway and then a series of downstream nodes. The power of the “mesh” is that the downstream nodes don’t have to directly link to the gateway to pass its information along. The nodes work together as team and pass information from node to node that eventually makes it back to the gateway for the data to be processed. Think of it as a linear approach to networking. Nodes can stretch far away from the gateway without ever losing touch. As long as a node can find another node to talk to, all the nodes can communicate with the gateway.
Why is this an advantage? It allows for unique applications. The best commercial application I’ve seen it deployed for is wireless lighting controls. A string of light fixtures can communicate to a head end device (gateway) regardless of where the lights are located. There are obviously limitations but instead of having to worry about placing the head end device in the middle of all the light fixtures, which could be challenging in certain applications, the gateway can reside in an easy location to reach with traditional cabling.
Another huge advantage of ZigBee and its self created mesh network is its ability to manipulate how the nodes are grouped and controlled. Traditional lighting involves groups of lights on a circuit. If a new floor layout is required, light fixtures will have to be added or subtracted from the circuit to accommodate the new layout. New wires will have to be pulled connecting the fixtures for the desired layout. With a wireless lighting control system, new wires and physical connections are not necessary. Through simple programming, the nodes controlling the fixtures can be added or subtracted from a group to make a layout change.
The real buzz that grabs people’s attention is not so much what you can tell the nodes to do, but more so what the nodes can tell you on what’s actually going on. It’s a two way street. Nodes can report their current status ranging from on or off, current load, ballast is dead, or a bulb has burned out. Maintenance of your lighting system suddenly went from reactive to proactive. The real time status updates are a huge perk and delivers a whole new approach to monitoring a lighting system. All made easier, in part due to the ZigBee protocol.
