ZigBee Kits 3

Nov. 13, 2007

Next in this series on ZigBee kits, Technology Editor Bill Wong takes a look at offerings from Freescale, Microchip, and Synapse.

William G. Wong

The kits in this articles mix include those from Freescale, Microchip and Synapse. They are distinctly different. Freescale’s offering is a complete, high-end solution that is designed to sell chips. Microchip's is designed to sell chips too, but it includes a software stack with functionality similar to the low-end ZigBee market but without the overhead of joining the ZigBee Alliance. Both look for the user to supply code to the mix. On the other hand, Synapse’s offering moves closer to an end product with a simpler system interface. It is designed to sell Synape’s modules running the Synapse Network Appliance Protocol (SNAP). A simple serial interface is all that is necessary to control the system. More functional carrier boards based on the modules are included in kit as well. What kind of kit and platform will interest you depends upon the level of expertise and the time that will be allocated to software development. Modules and complete systems offer reduce time to market while working with the chips means potentially lower cost in the long run. It’s nice to have options. It is also handy to have lots of AA batteries around when playing with these kits. Read the articles here: Freescale's Busy BeeStack Microchip Makes MiWi Synapse Sports SNAP Related Links ZigBee Alliance

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.