By Cees Links, Top dog & Founder of GreenPeak
Recently the RF4CE Connections got themselves adopted because of the ZigBee Alliance, a clear example of a new win-win situation. For the RF4CE Alliance it means an immediate broad adoption within the consumer electronics industry, while keeping away from the cost of setting up a “marketing machine” to achieve this.
For that ZigBee Alliance this is a brilliant transfer to a direction that will allow it to be flourish. For the consumer electronics marketplace, and in particular for the end-customers, this re-homing is a clear stake in the ground that opens up opportunities for just a wide range of new and exciting applications.
In 1999, this ZigBee Alliance was spun removed from the IEEE 802.11 organization (it’s possible better known as the Wi-Fi Alliance). The main goal was to establish and also promote ZigBee as a simpler equivalent of Wi-Fi targeted for smaller embedded microprocessors.
What made Wi-Fi so successful seemed to be its straight forward and easy to learn application focus (getting laptop computers on the Internet) combined with a clear engineering environment (PCMIA-bus, TCP/IP, etc.). In contrast, from a quick start, ZigBee development started to sputter mainly because it was “too much for also many” and almost became “nothing to get nobody”.
The reason was that the application room that ZigBee tried to cover ended up being too diverse, from households, to buildings, to business, to energy management, and many others. The problem it created ended up being twofold: too many diverging requirements creating compromises just not good enough for many of us applications, plus just too many various and diverse microprocessor platforms. Add to this the normal layer of company unique interests and organizational nation-wide politics and it is clear that progress in standardization is an easy victim.
A couple of examples of these compromises have been reliability and energy consumption. Numerous industrial applications need a huge level of reliability while other applications could live with “normal” excellence but need extreme reduced power consumption, so reduced that reliability was additional.
