Customer Reviews

Zigbee Wireless Networking

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a good reference to get before you start your work on a Zigbee project because it will get you thinking of the issues involved and if Zigbee is the correct solution. The protocal stack for Zigbee is quite large but it offers many features. Most manufacturers have a proprietary or third party stack that offers fewer features but take up substantially less code space. The book and examples are for Freescale processors (and thier IDE) but do apply generally to others. Some code from the book is available on the book's web site but as of when I checked last (Oct. 2009) it was quite a bit less than I would have expected. Hopefully that will change. Never the less there is plenty of Zigbee code online to download.

The ZigBee specs can be very hard to read and understand. This book really helps. Unfortunately, the listed website has no links so the examples are not easily available. Doing some research, I found that the real url is [...]. There you can find only the code for Chapter 7.

The data captures in the downloads are in dcf format which is a simple text representation of the data without annotation. The author seems to say that the dcf file can be viewed with the Daintree SNA packet sniffer. The problem is that Daintree dropped SNA so it's unavailable. The reader is left with this:

#Format=4
# SNA v2.2.0.1 SUS:20090221 ACT:606272
1 1207336071.837218 10 030860ffffffff07ffff 165 1 -45 255 1 0 1 32767
2 1207336073.824876 10 03082cffffffff07ffff 188 1 -38 255 2 0 1 32767
3 1207336073.827045 24 00809f000f0000ffcf0000002184010004b037c25000ffff 161 1 -46 255 3 0 1 32767
4 1207336075.849341 21 23c82d000f0000ffff020004b037c25000018effff 194 1 -36 255 4 0 1 32767


Which isn't very useful. It would be much better if the author would do a text extraction similar to what's in the book which describes every field.

Frame 3 (Length = 24 bytes)
IEEE 802.15.4
Frame Control: 0x8000
.... .... .... .000 = Frame Type: Beacon (0x0000)
.... .... .... 0... = Security Enabled: Disabled
.... .... ...0 .... = Frame Pending: No more data
.... .... ..0. .... = Acknowledgement not required
.... .... .0.. .... = Intra PAN: Not within the PAN
.... ..00 0... .... = Reserved
.... 00.. .... .... = Destination Address: not present
..00 .... .... .... = Reserved
10.. .... .... .... = Source Address: 16-bit short address
Sequence Number: 205
Source PAN Identifier: 0x0bef
Source Address: 0x0000
MAC Payload
Superframe Specification: 0xcfff
.... .... .... 1111 = Beacon Order (0x000f)
.... .... 1111 .... = Superframe Order (0x000f)

In summary, I think this is an excellent effort but is incomplete. An email to the author requesting dumps was not returned.

this is a great book, however the code examples used in the book is not really on the related website, in fact only one chapter has code there, thus 4 stars.

Zigbee is not only a transceiver... there is a whole world of possibilities, specially with the ZCL and the Application Profile. This book explains in deep detail these items neccesary to create a Zigbee Application.

I borrowed this book from a friend of mine and I'm really impressed with it. I wanted my students (university and graduate level) to develop some projects using Zigbee, but the documentation found online is horrible. Then I found this book and thought "now they don't have any excuses!"... Mr Gislason takes a very practical hands-on approach walking you through the concepts and exemplifying them with running code. I am sure ordering my copy today... but meanwhile I will keep my friend's book with me :)

Drew Gisalson is a well respected person in the ZigBee community and his book is without a doubt the best book so far on ZigBee. The book has a very "practical" approach and has lots of source code examples (which also are available for download!!) that can be used directly by the reader.

This book has boiled down thousands of pages of complex specifications into a clearly readable, easily understood description of what ZigBee is and how it should be implemented. Mr. Gislason knows what he is talking about.