Elk+CentraLite and Zigbee?

[Brightan]

I have just started playing around with Zigbee on a developers level with a development
kit and extra modules from XBee so I don't know much of anything yet, but, correct me
if I'm wrong... Any company can have a zigbee product and they can even use the same
stack but the way they are packing their data into the packets is completely up to them
and therefore makes them completely incompatible with each other. It is kind of like
saying I have two products that are both ethernet enabled and expecting them to talk
to each other. Now I realize that the ZB alliance has released a profile for home automation
but I suspect that by now most companies have gone their own direction and looking
at the profile it seems pretty limited at this point. If you wanted any extra features you would
have to be part of the alliance to get changes made or again, go your own direction.
Protocols by committee take a long time and with multiple companies pulling in different
directions things can take even longer. If an individual or single company created a
good profile that could be expanded on by anybody it creates other problems, like
conformance testing issues and how to administer changes etc. And what company
can afford to spend time supporting every other company using its development? I think what will
ultimately happen is that there will be a number of Zigbee bridges that will be
available to interconnect different products or maybe home control software that is
capable of talking a number of different "dialects" of zigbee.
Anyway, this is just my observations and I am open to corrections...

 

[Steve]

Warning - bump of older thread...

After spending some time at Ehx with Centralite and others, its does seem as if Chris and Brightan were correct. Each manufacturers Zigbee products only talk directly to themselves. To talk to 3rd party devices you need to go through their bridges. While this may not be ideal or even desired, my take on it is that it is no big deal if you are using a central controller like the Elk or HAI. Simply use your panel as the mediator between different systems. For example if I use JetStream switches and want to talk to an HAI Zigbee thermostat, I can't do it directly, but I can have the controller see the switch then in turn control the stat. So while you can't do direct, controllerless operations, you can still have different Zigbee devices work together just fine.

 

[elcano]

Steve, see a related comment in this other post: http://www.cocoontech.com/forums/index.php...mp;#entry113972