Sunday, May 15, 2011

Zigbee update

As you may (or may not) know, we've been working on a wireless monitoring system using zigbee radios from Digi. Sean and Charlie have been working diligently on the commercial setup; Sean on programming and Charlie on the routers and networking- and I have been feeling a bit like a fifth wheel for a while.
So, rather than keep meddling with the stuff they have (about $20K worth of stuff) I decided to get a tweet-a-watt kit from adafruit industries I blogged a few weeks ago when I built it.
After I built the stuff, I hit a brick wall trying to run the python software that you can download from the site. Somewhere along the line, I just couldn't get it to work. I made an appointment with Sean and Charlie hoping they could help me out, but yesterday I finally just hunkered down, set everything up, and pushed myself to get it working.
The problem was that I missed the step of unpackaging and storing simplejson in the same folder as the python scripts downloaded from the site. so after I got over that hurdle, we plugged the halogen lamp into the modded kill-a-watt- and for the first time (for me) I got data logging across a zigbee radio.


This whole exercize has taught me quite a bit about the hardware and the software behind all this zigbee stuff. I know how the radios pin out, and I understand quite a bit more about what it takes to get the software to interface with an actual computer.
Also, since I got a rig for carrying my stuff around, I should be able to make better progress moving forward.

2 comments:

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wow wireless monitoring with zigbee....we have thoght of it in our project and came out of it !! its really an interesting one..webhosting

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