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Wooha, thats kind of awesome. Does this mean you could make your own zigbee sensors or whatever?
by sandos 4y ago
Wooha, thats kind of awesome. Does this mean you could make your own zigbee sensors or whatever?
- LASR 4y agoYou can already do that with all kinds of boards. You don’t necessarily need it to run Linux.
- wojciii 4y agoI would think that Zephyr would be better suited for this. Linux is great for many things, but it can also be overkill.
- VLM 4y agoThe ultimate "wireless sensor" experience would probably be something like an ESP32 size, power, and price that provides a nice Node-RED interface on the sensor.
- jacob019 4y agoGenerally I would agree with that sentiment, but when we have Linux running on cheap low power MCU grade hardware, why not use it?
- chasd00 4y agoI have a pie zero w doing things with its GPIO. It’s super nice to ssh right to the board to update src code without having to go through the flash dance. I know Linux is not “hard real-time” but it’s close enough. All the real-time reqs I have get offloaded to a dedicated pwm breakout and communicated with over i2c anyway.
- dragontamer 4y agoZigbee? My man, ESP32 boards get you 802.11 WiFi for like $5 these days. Zigbee is the kind of protocol designed for even simpler, more power efficient microcontrollers. Think closer to a $1 microcontroller instead. There is a reason we have lol WiFi light bulbs. The uC that powers the smarts are really cheap these days.
- galangalalgol 4y agoI think his point was something to sense zigbee? Would be nice to set it in your house and bridge your power meter, water meter, whatever, onto your wifi. Could have it incorporated into your budget app live. "huh, no dinner out this week, better turn down the heat!". And if anyone figures outbhow to use that NPU you could even do some inference to get some trends or something. Or even a classifier that could detect a short or water leak perhaps.
- dragontamer 4y agoHmm. I dunno radios (skipped that class way back in college). I'm guessing that although 802.11 and Zigbee use 2.4 Ghz, you might need 2x radios physically tuned for the correct frequencies, and listening at the same time. Looks like channel 1 802.11 is different than channel 15 Zigbee for instance, so bridging the two might need two different radios. So you'd need a 802.11 radio + Zigbee Radio working as a team (even if ESP32 has enough CPU power to handle both, there are likely physical limitations to radio designs). And I'm pretty sure that the radios use more power than the microcontroller in any case. ------ In any case, there seem to be many 802.11 to Zigbee bridges already available. So you should only attempt the project as a learning experience.
- odiroot 4y agoI have a few ESP boards. I still try to go for everything-Zigbee in my smart home setup. It's much less chatty, uses much less power and works with a standard protocol (no need for flashing TasmOTA etc). So much easier to integrate than anything WiFi.
- nine_k 4y agoAFAICT your home-grade wireless router / AP will start having trouble when you have dozens of Wi-Fi devices actively working in your home. ZigBee is somehow more resilient. It's also much lower energy, more comparable to Bluetooth, but much longer range: the sweet spot for smaller battery-powered devices. OTOH I remember that ZigBee is somehow more buttoned-up than BT and even wi-fi, so it's not commonly seen on likes of ESP32 and other small MCUs.