Wireless Products

Sept. 15, 2005

Module Simplifies ZigBee Support The ZigRay Wireless Data Transceiver module from Tecnova is a small-footprint pc board that incroporates a Freescale MC9S08GT60 microcontroller with an MC13192/3 ZigBee transciever. The module is available with or witho

William G. Wong

Module Simplifies ZigBee Support

The ZigRay Wireless Data Transceiver module from Tecnova is a small-footprint pc board that incroporates a Freescale MC9S08GT60 microcontroller with an MC13192/3 ZigBee transciever. The module is available with or without a ZigBee protocol stack. The wireless data rate is 250 kbits/s, and the microcontroller interface is 19.2 kbits/s serial. Eight data lines and four 10-bit analog-to-digital converter connections from the microcontroller are available. Pricing for the transceiver starts at $50, or $35 in OEM quantities. The communications module costs $275. www.tecnova.com

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PC/104-Plus Module Hosts 802.11b/g

The PPM-Wireless is a PC/104-Plus compliant module from WinSystems. It's designed to add 802.11b or 802.11g wireless networking to a PC/104-Plus system. The board's MiniPCI connector accepts a wireless MiniPCI card like Intel's PRO/Wireless 2200BG Mini-PCI card. A surface-mounted assembly external connector provides support for an external antenna. PPM-Wireless pricing starts at $149. www.winsystems.com

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ZigBee Transceiver Melds With MCU

Freescale's MC1320X family includes three pin-compatible standalone 2.4-GHz RF transceivers with an integrated Tx/Rx switch designed to mesh with with Freescale's HCS08, HC12, Coldfire, and DSC processors. Integrated versions will use Freescale's low-voltage, low-power HCS08 core with embedded flash memory and peripherals, such as 10-bit analog-to-digital converters, and low-voltage/brownout and keyboard interrupts. The chips will run Freescale's wireless Zstack. The stack initially will support proprietary point-to-point and simple ZigBee star networking. Pricing will start at $2.35. www.freescale.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.