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Zigbee? 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 microc

Zigbee? 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Hmm. 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 ago
I 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 ago
AFAICT 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.
- schwartzworld 4y ago
  You don't need to connect dozens of devices. Esp32 can communicate as a server or a client so you can directly connect them without getting the router involved.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Say, your house has 15 light switches on esp32 running Tasmota. Do they all talk to each other in a mesh network, or do they all connect to your router in WIFI infrastructure mode?
    - lioeters 4y ago
      There's a protocol called ESP MESH, with which multiple ESP32 (and ESP8266) can talk to each other. > ESP-WIFI-MESH is a wireless communication network with nodes organized in a mesh topology using the simultaneous AP-STA feature on Espressif SoCs. It provides a self-forming and self-healing network, with ease of deployment. The network topology of ESP-WIFI-MESH can scale up to 1000 nodes in large areas. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/sdks/esp-wifi-mesh/overview https://www.espressif.com/en/products/sdks/esp-wifi-mesh/ove... https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp-mesh-esp32-esp8266-painlessmesh/ https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp-mesh-esp32-esp8266-painl... --- I didn't know that home WiFi routers have difficulty with more than a dozen connections, but I imagine ESP MESH could be a way around it, where a few devices connect to your router and act as access points for the rest of them.
    - teleforce 4y ago
      In addition to ESP-Mesh protocol as mentioned in the sibling's comment, alternatively ESP-Now protocol also enabled lightweight support for direct networking without AP: https://www.espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-now/overview https://www.espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-now/overv... https://github.com/espressif/esp-now https://github.com/espressif/esp-now

galangalalgol 4y ago

I 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 ago
Hmm. 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 ago

I 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 ago

AFAICT 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.

schwartzworld 4y ago
You don't need to connect dozens of devices. Esp32 can communicate as a server or a client so you can directly connect them without getting the router involved.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Say, your house has 15 light switches on esp32 running Tasmota. Do they all talk to each other in a mesh network, or do they all connect to your router in WIFI infrastructure mode?
  - lioeters 4y ago
    There's a protocol called ESP MESH, with which multiple ESP32 (and ESP8266) can talk to each other. > ESP-WIFI-MESH is a wireless communication network with nodes organized in a mesh topology using the simultaneous AP-STA feature on Espressif SoCs. It provides a self-forming and self-healing network, with ease of deployment. The network topology of ESP-WIFI-MESH can scale up to 1000 nodes in large areas. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/sdks/esp-wifi-mesh/overview https://www.espressif.com/en/products/sdks/esp-wifi-mesh/ove... https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp-mesh-esp32-esp8266-painlessmesh/ https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp-mesh-esp32-esp8266-painl... --- I didn't know that home WiFi routers have difficulty with more than a dozen connections, but I imagine ESP MESH could be a way around it, where a few devices connect to your router and act as access points for the rest of them.
  - teleforce 4y ago
    In addition to ESP-Mesh protocol as mentioned in the sibling's comment, alternatively ESP-Now protocol also enabled lightweight support for direct networking without AP: https://www.espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-now/overview https://www.espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-now/overv... https://github.com/espressif/esp-now https://github.com/espressif/esp-now