ZigBee Development Kit Comes With Free Stack

Dec. 16, 2004

ZigBee is finally becoming reality, or so it seems with the arrival of development kits like the PICDEM Z 2.4 GHz Demonstration Kit crafted by Microchip Technology. This low-cost tool provides a pair of peer-to-peer nodes. These are...

William G. Wong

ZigBee is finally becoming reality, or so it seems with the arrival of development kits like the PICDEM Z 2.4 GHz Demonstration Kit crafted by Microchip Technology.

This low-cost tool provides a pair of peer-to-peer nodes. These are controlled by a PIC18LF4620 microcontroller that employs Microchip's nanoWatt Technology power-managed modes. The MCU has 64 kbytes of flash program memory and advanced analog, control, and communications peripherals. The RF board holds Chipcon's CC2420 2.4-GHz RF transceiver. Communication between the two is done via a serial peripheral interface.

The MCU comes programmed with a free ZigBee network stack that implements a ZigBee endpoint node. Less than 12 kbytes of flash and a couple of hundred bytes of RAM are used, leaving plenty of processing power and memory for application code. PIC MCUs with more memory are available. The stack can support a Reduced Function Device (RFD) or a Full Function Device (FFD). Standard Microchip development tools, including the MPLab ICD2 in-circuit debugger, come with the demo board.

The PICDEM Z 2.4 GHz Demonstration Kit costs $199. The board and RF card are available separately for $89 and $49, respectively.

Microchip Technology Inc.www.microchip.com

See associated figure

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.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

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.