TCE ZigNET
Integrating TCE
Official Release: Friday, 26th of May, 2006
This is the page where you
will find
everything about our project. The left panes below gives a list of
FAQs,
and the right panes gives more technical stuff.
Who are we?
What is TCE ZigNET all about?
TCE stands for Thiagarajar College of Engineering, and Zig is for representing Zigbee. Basically, it is forming a Zigbee network within our college campus. In otherwords, its is implementing a Wireless Sensor Network.
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What is Zigbee? Why here?
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Comparison of Zigbee with other protocols
Wireless networking has many facets (from satellite links, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,..) but they differ in many aspects like speed, power requirement. Zigbee is one such wireless interface (not a competitor to any one of the aforementioned technologies).
The list given below is popular jargons of wireless arena, but they are intended for different purposes. For example:
Why did we choose this project?
What are the applications?
Applications are enormous from this point. To say a few:
Interoperability+Zigbee stack issues
What is and why AVR?
Where we faced problems?
Acknowledgements:
This project would have gone nowhere from paper, without the participation of many . We would like to acknowledge the help of the following persons:
Dr. V Abhai Kumar,
Principal, TCE, Madurai,
for his never-ending support and ever-smiling face. His words marked the gestation of this project.
Dr. (Mrs.) S Raju,
Head, RF Systems Lab,
TIFAC-TARC, TCE, Madurai,
who have been instrumental in converting this idea onto a prototype.
Mr. K. Hariharan,
Lecturer, Dept of ECE,
TCE, Madurai,
who is the guide for this project, and we thank him for directing us in the right way.
Ms. B. Sathya Bama,
Lecturer, Dept of ECE,
TCE, Madurai,
She is our mentor, and she never lets us down. There were times when we felt diffident over this project, since we faced so many problems technically. She was always with us, encouraging and supporting us morally.
Special thanks to:
Mr. Balasubramanian Pitchandi,
TCE Alumnus(1995-1999),
San Jose, US,
for his enthusiastic support right from the beginning of this project, and funding this project in critical time. His help cant be expressed by words. We owe a lot for him.
Mr. Yella Veera Prakash,
Mr. Arun Mahasenan, and
Mr. A R Karthikeyan,
of Honeywell Tech Solutions, Bangalore and Madurai,
for their encouraging words, and cheering us.
We thank Mr. Y V Prakash for his thought-provoking presentation in Wireless Sensor Networks at RF BASE conference, TIFAC-TCE on Dec 12th, 2005. It was his idea of having a sensor network within TCE campus drove us towards this project. Mr. Arun gave us the direction towards Chipcon radios, Mr. A R Karthikeyan gave suggestions towards the project prototyping.
Mr. Raghunathan(Chennai),
Mr. Nitin Awasthi( Bangalore),
Mr. Steve M Taylor (UK),
Mr. Oliver Borek (France),
for helping us in buying Chipcon CC2420 modules from France.
Mr. Kannan(Chennai) for sending us ATmega8535 chips, that too the 'L' versions(!),
Mr. Nandha Kumar(Erode) for sending us some components which were unavailable in Madurai,
Mr. Abishek Singal(Kanpur), for helping us regarding AVR and sending us the materials, datasheets,
Mr. Abishek Singh (Bilaspur), for providing his collection of useful Compiler materials, datasheets, PCB software.
Mr. Pascal Stang(US). He is the author of most helpful library for AVR microcontrollers, the AVRLib. Without this library, life would have been so difficult with the device drivers. We also thank him for providing some test routines for CC2420.
Mantis Project Team, for their existing work with CC2420, which helped us to debug some portion of our device drivers.
8051 forum, AVR Freaks forum, Euphoria forum, Byethost forum, Chipcon Technical Support, and AVR-GCC team for their technical support.
All friends at RF Systems lab, TARC, for their companionship during our work time at lab,
Our classmates, Aravind for his support for PC and Web interface, S Vignesh for camera courtesy,
Our juniors, Pradheep, Shankar, Vadivel, Vikram, Subbu, Balaji, for their support in PCB fabrication,
and many others who have helped in the process of making this project a success.
Above all, we dedicate this work to our parents, who are always behind us, motivating and encouraging us.
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| Why,
What, Who, When, How |
Technical Documents |
Present status
|
Pictures |
| Who
are we? What is TCE ZigNET all about? Why did we choose this project? What are the applications? What is Zigbee? Why here? Comparison of Zigbee with other popular wireless stds. like Wi-Fi, WiMax, Blutooth Interoperability+Zigbee stack issues What is and why AVR? |
Initial Proposal,
dt 2-Aug-06 ( download PDF, 153 kB) 1st review dt 16-Jan-06 ( download PDF, 448 kB) 2nd review dt 17-Feb-06 ( download PDF, kB) 3rd review dt 15-Mar-06 ( download PDF, 112 kB) (more to come after complete ratifications) |
What
has been accomplished? Where we faced problems? What is the scope of this project? Cost per node Acknowledgements (The source code for Zigbee driver and this project is completely open sourced. (GNU - AVR - GCC) It will be released here shortly along with schematics of the individual nodes) |
Vignesh, Gokul PCBs |
| Please
leave your feedbacks here.. This would help us in making this project
better. |
Who are we?
We
are final year Bachelor's degree graduates, studying in
prestigious Thiagarajar
College of
Engineering, Madurai. We have almost completed(by June'06)
our degree in Electronics and
Communication Engineering, and about to pursue our professional
assignments.
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What is TCE ZigNET all about?
TCE stands for Thiagarajar College of Engineering, and Zig is for representing Zigbee. Basically, it is forming a Zigbee network within our college campus. In otherwords, its is implementing a Wireless Sensor Network.
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What is Zigbee? Why here?
Zigbee is an amazing technology
for sensor
networking. To explain in a nutshell, Zigbee enables us to connect
various sensors (like temperature, humidity, light, pressure, fire..)
and detectors (like intruder, gas, smoke..) with each other
wirelessely, so that, the environment becomes "particle-aware".
(Picture courtesy : http://www.necel.com/en/news/archive/0411/images/1501.gif)
(Picture courtesy : http://www.necel.com/en/news/archive/0411/images/1501.gif)
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Comparison of Zigbee with other protocols
Wireless networking has many facets (from satellite links, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,..) but they differ in many aspects like speed, power requirement. Zigbee is one such wireless interface (not a competitor to any one of the aforementioned technologies).
The list given below is popular jargons of wireless arena, but they are intended for different purposes. For example:
- Wi-Fi
is for high
speed, short distance data access (typically as "Wireless ethernet" for
Laptops)
- WiMax
is high speed, larger area coverage, Last mile copper replacement
solution
- Bluetooth
is
short range, Personal Area Network protocol, typically for PDAs,
Mobiles to exchange data
- Zigbee is low datarate, very low power, low footprint sensor networking protocol.
Why did we choose this project?
We wanted to do something
challenging. Our
initial idea was to implement a Public Announcement System for the
college, so that the circulars, info, and other messages could be
easily passed to the students. Powerline communication was the chosen
technology for this. But due to various technical issues, we had to
drop this idea.
Then came the idea behind wireless communication. Interestingly, Wireless is the theme area of our department, and our college is a participant of TIFAC-CORE program in Wireless Technologies. So migration from powerline communciation to wireless way made good sense.
Doing a complete system in wireless is not a trivial issue, and doing the announcement system is more risky due to licencing issues from the government, base station installation, and many more. We did some research studies over installing a FM station for our college, just like Anna FM, an exclusive FM broadcast station run by Anna University. But the clearance from the government would take more than the time we had, we dropped the same.
All went in the way of Zigbee, so this project came alive.
^
^
To Top ^ ^Then came the idea behind wireless communication. Interestingly, Wireless is the theme area of our department, and our college is a participant of TIFAC-CORE program in Wireless Technologies. So migration from powerline communciation to wireless way made good sense.
Doing a complete system in wireless is not a trivial issue, and doing the announcement system is more risky due to licencing issues from the government, base station installation, and many more. We did some research studies over installing a FM station for our college, just like Anna FM, an exclusive FM broadcast station run by Anna University. But the clearance from the government would take more than the time we had, we dropped the same.
All went in the way of Zigbee, so this project came alive.
What are the applications?
Applications are enormous from this point. To say a few:
- Attendance Logging
- Electrical appliance control
- Building Lighting Control
- Security systems
- Class room monitoring
- Remote Data logging
- Any other purpose using the network
Interoperability+Zigbee stack issues
Zigbee is
intended to provide interoperability with various manufacturers,
worldwide. Say for instance, a Zigbee enabled smoke sensor should be
able to 'talk' with a Zigbee enabled intruder detector, and forming a
co-operative network. This is analogous to our Bluetooth enabled mobile
gadgets, which could interface with each other, seamlessly.
But Zigbee stack is
essential only when you require
devices of everyother manufacturer have to be interfaced with
your system. In otherwords, for a self-accomplished installation,
Zigbee stack is not essential.
The PHY and MAC layers of Zigbee is ratified by IEEE as IEEE 802.15.4
under Personal Area Network protocol family. The upper layers, except
the Application layer is defined by a consortium of various
companies, called Zigbee.
We wanted our
devices to be inter-operable, but not with every Zigbee
device.
This may sound a little bit senseless, but we are trying to implement
Zigbee stack separately.
^
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To Top ^ ^What is and why AVR?
There is no
standard expansion for AVR, but most think that is is expanded as
Advanced Version of RISC. It is a family of microcoltrollers, just like
8051, PIC, ARM,... AVR is very powerful in many ways, and best suited
for this job.
We choose AVR for the
simple reason is that, it is
powerful enough to be a baseband controller for Zigbee radio, and other
aspects like development tools, programmer, availability, cost, voted
for AVR. 8051 could be used, but we felt comfortable with AVRs. PIC
could have been another good choice for this project.
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What has been accomplished?
We have successfully implemented a raw packet transfer system over RF, and the range is approx. 30m under closed room conditions. With this in mind, we could implement sensors which are literally hidden inside a room, but which will keep on talking over the RF with the acquired data. Moreover, packet forwarding is
simple from
this point, since
we need to check destination address and then repeat the transmission.
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To Top ^ ^^ ^ To Top ^ ^
What has been accomplished?
We have successfully implemented a raw packet transfer system over RF, and the range is approx. 30m under closed room conditions. With this in mind, we could implement sensors which are literally hidden inside a room, but which will keep on talking over the RF with the acquired data.
Where we faced problems?
We have learned
a lot from this project, both technically and managing a project. To
keep the initial enthusiasm of a project kicking, was the most
difficult problem we faced. We faced bigger bottle necks when the
Chipcon's CC2420 Radio module was unavailable with India, and the
importing costs were beyond our reach. Thanks to our Principal, Dr. V
Abhai Kumar and our mentor Dr. (Mrs.) Raju for not letting us down
during this period. The chips were finally bought from a French company
called M/s. BKTroniuqe.
Interfacing the chip
was next major hurdle, and it
took more time than we thought. We had to accomplish this task only in
college premises, since the oscilloscopes, and other tools were not
available at
home. We would write some test code at home tonight, will test the same
tomorrow in college. This cycle was hectic, and it continued for weeks
together. We also put many PCBs with slightly different interfacing
configurations to make the Zigbee radio work. This process went on for
nearly 2 months, and the CC2420 responded finally.
Other issues were, we have to
fabricate
everything on our own. The list
includes programmer for AVR, PCBs for Zigbee radio, a mini logic
analyser(which had failed atlast), sensor interfacing part, and much
more. GNU GCC compiler and AVR was completely alien to us till December
2005, then only we succeed in a LED blink program.
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What is the scope of this project?
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What is the scope of this project?
Speaking in terms
of scope, what we
have achieved is a framework or wireless infrastructure, so more
applications could be built above this in the forthcoming years. A
typical example would be, laying solid foundation for a house, and the
rooms could then be built by our fellow juniors.
We intended to build a complete Zigbee stack, adhering to Zigbee v1 specifications, but later we realised that it was a huge job. With just three persons in our group, and building all the layers of Zigbee stack is unimaginable, within the stipulated time of 6 months. Time was a critical parameter, so all ended up in Physical, Data link, and a primitive Network layer for Zigbee radio.
We intended to build a complete Zigbee stack, adhering to Zigbee v1 specifications, but later we realised that it was a huge job. With just three persons in our group, and building all the layers of Zigbee stack is unimaginable, within the stipulated time of 6 months. Time was a critical parameter, so all ended up in Physical, Data link, and a primitive Network layer for Zigbee radio.
Some of the possible scopes of the present work are:
- Wirelessly connected sensors
- Wireless control of electrical appliances
- Interfacing a node with a webserver (preferably TCE Cray server) so that all the logged data can be viewed over internet
And much more. What we have done is a
robust
system (since
Zigbee is robust) which could potentially replace lots of cables for
sensing
and control applications in home and industrial implementations.
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To Top ^ ^
1. ATmega8535L microcontroller
-
Rs. 240
2. EasyBee CC2420 module - Rs. 1260
3. PCB and Connectors - Rs. 75
4. Discretes - Rs. 30
5. Batteries ( 2 x Alkaline AA) - Rs. 15
6. Sensors - Rs. 30
(We’ve used LDR – for light, Piezo element – for vibrations and a germanium diode – for temperature sensing)
Grand Total /
node
-
Rs. 1650
The cost is not high, since we ordered very low volumes and the single major cost player is EasyBee module, which we had at 1260 each. There are cheap vendors for larger volumes (say 1000 pieces), which would bring the cost to Rs. 700 or even less. A comparison with existing wireless portfolios would be worth here. 433MHz ASK systems are very popular for sensor applications and they cost around Rs. 600 for a single Tx-Rx pair (due to mass production from various vendors). The do lack any sort of standard, and we have to devise all the networking layers except the physical layer.
The Zigbee implementation, including the
microcontroller and
the sensors could be less than Rs. 1, 000 if this is also mass
produced. If a
room serves as one node, and if there are 50 such nodes in a hotel, the
initial
deployment cost of Zigbee networked sensors may be around Rs. 60, 000,
but in
the long run, this will be very economical considering the maintenance
and
trouble shooting processes of cable-installed systems, say a RS 485
implementation.
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^
To Top ^ ^
Acknowledgements:
This project would have gone nowhere from paper, without the participation of many . We would like to acknowledge the help of the following persons:
Dr. V Abhai Kumar,
Principal, TCE, Madurai,
for his never-ending support and ever-smiling face. His words marked the gestation of this project.
Dr. (Mrs.) S Raju,
Head, RF Systems Lab,
TIFAC-TARC, TCE, Madurai,
who have been instrumental in converting this idea onto a prototype.
Mr. K. Hariharan,
Lecturer, Dept of ECE,
TCE, Madurai,
who is the guide for this project, and we thank him for directing us in the right way.
Ms. B. Sathya Bama,
Lecturer, Dept of ECE,
TCE, Madurai,
She is our mentor, and she never lets us down. There were times when we felt diffident over this project, since we faced so many problems technically. She was always with us, encouraging and supporting us morally.
Special thanks to:
Mr. Balasubramanian Pitchandi,
TCE Alumnus(1995-1999),
San Jose, US,
for his enthusiastic support right from the beginning of this project, and funding this project in critical time. His help cant be expressed by words. We owe a lot for him.
Mr. Yella Veera Prakash,
Mr. Arun Mahasenan, and
Mr. A R Karthikeyan,
of Honeywell Tech Solutions, Bangalore and Madurai,
for their encouraging words, and cheering us.
We thank Mr. Y V Prakash for his thought-provoking presentation in Wireless Sensor Networks at RF BASE conference, TIFAC-TCE on Dec 12th, 2005. It was his idea of having a sensor network within TCE campus drove us towards this project. Mr. Arun gave us the direction towards Chipcon radios, Mr. A R Karthikeyan gave suggestions towards the project prototyping.
Mr. Raghunathan(Chennai),
Mr. Nitin Awasthi( Bangalore),
Mr. Steve M Taylor (UK),
Mr. Oliver Borek (France),
for helping us in buying Chipcon CC2420 modules from France.
Mr. Kannan(Chennai) for sending us ATmega8535 chips, that too the 'L' versions(!),
Mr. Nandha Kumar(Erode) for sending us some components which were unavailable in Madurai,
Mr. Abishek Singal(Kanpur), for helping us regarding AVR and sending us the materials, datasheets,
Mr. Abishek Singh (Bilaspur), for providing his collection of useful Compiler materials, datasheets, PCB software.
Mr. Pascal Stang(US). He is the author of most helpful library for AVR microcontrollers, the AVRLib. Without this library, life would have been so difficult with the device drivers. We also thank him for providing some test routines for CC2420.
Mantis Project Team, for their existing work with CC2420, which helped us to debug some portion of our device drivers.
8051 forum, AVR Freaks forum, Euphoria forum, Byethost forum, Chipcon Technical Support, and AVR-GCC team for their technical support.
All friends at RF Systems lab, TARC, for their companionship during our work time at lab,
Our classmates, Aravind for his support for PC and Web interface, S Vignesh for camera courtesy,
Our juniors, Pradheep, Shankar, Vadivel, Vikram, Subbu, Balaji, for their support in PCB fabrication,
and many others who have helped in the process of making this project a success.
Above all, we dedicate this work to our parents, who are always behind us, motivating and encouraging us.
^ ^ To Top ^ ^
