[HH] FreakZ: Open Source Zigbee Stack

[Tom Metro]

A hardware hacker from Tokyo has been working on an open source software
stack for the Zigbee wireless protocol. (The project dates back to 2008.
Not sure how mature it is. The Sourceforge project page says it was
updated last in April 2013.)

The Zigbee software marketplace he describes sounds a lot like the one
that exits for Z-Wave, where your choices are generally either to get
the software stack from the chip manufacturer under NDA, often as binary
blobs, and restricted to using it only with that vendor's hardware, or
you license stacks for great sums from third party commercial vendors.
(OpenZwave was created to address this on the Z-Wave side.)

I wasn't aware that Zigbee had these same problems. Unlike Z-Wave,
Zigbee is built on an open IEEE standard. (I just never paid much
attention to it with respect to the home automation marketplace, as the
Zigbee standards defines a lower-layer communication protocol. Something
that is far more general purpose than a home automation protocol. The
down side being that if you want interoperable home automation devices,
you need to define a standard protocol to run on top of Zigbee. In
contrast, Z-Wave is home automation specific, and Z-Wave home automation
products from different vendors know how to talk to each other.)


http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/FreakZ-Open-Source-Zigbee-Stack.html

  One of the problems with the current state of Zigbee is that the
  software is either provided by semiconductor suppliers and bound to
  their hardware, or is proprietary and requires heavy licensing fees.
  This causes some major issues that I have a problem with...


 -Tom