| Author |
The Death of Bluetooth? |
vpoil
Joined: May 14, 2002
Posts: 81
From: Toronto, Canada
PM |
Excuse the dramics of the title. As the subject of the topic is not so much a replacment for Bluetooth, it's just another standard which has another use....
Did anyone else read the 'New Scientist' article from the August 7th edition, introducing the new 'ZigBee' wireless standard? I have included it below..... There is also alot more about it on the net. Let me know your thoughts....
A techno-freak friend of mine, believes Blietooth is hanging on by the skin of it's teeth (no pun intended). Although I don't agree with him, as I understand it, it hasn't exeactly taken off in the U.S. and new wireless standards are being sort after all the time as a better replacment.
Anyway, heres the article....
A WIRELESS network designed to let people remotely control every electrical appliance in their home could finally make the dream of the smart home a reality. Called ZigBee, the radio technology is being readied for a 2005 launch by a clutch of electronics companies.
To build a ZigBee network, low-power, two-way radio microchips will have to be installed in many electrical devices or appliances, so that they can be controlled or monitored remotely.
What will it do? Imagine, while at work, being able to check if you have left your garage door open. Or if you've left a light on. Or set the heating too high. Did you leave the oven on? Is the alarm set? Such questions could be answered at a stroke simply by using your cellphone to call into a ZigBee base station at home. This controller would communicate with every ZigBee-enabled device and either send you back data on its status or let you change some aspect of its operation.
Or, when at home, you can use a PDA instead of your cellphone to communicate with the ZigBee base station and control devices as varied as the garden sprinkler, the washing machine or the TV set.
But hold on. Wasn't Bluetooth, the short-range radio system built into cellphones and laptops, meant to do all this for us when it was launched four years ago? Yes, but that was before anyone realised how power-hungry it is. Bluetooth is a pretty compulsive communicator: it is always "listening" out for transmissions and draining the power of the devices it communicates with. That's OK for cellphones and laptops that are recharged regularly, but no good for smoke detectors, say, which run on batteries designed to last months or years rather than days.
So some 70 companies, including Motorola, Honeywell, Samsung, Mitsubishi Electric and NEC, under the aegis of the ZigBee Alliance, are developing smart home microchips that use a host of clever power-saving tricks. Instead of being always on, or at least frequently on, the chips in a ZigBee network are programmed to synchronise their transmissions so that they are all either switched on or in sleep mode at the same time. They only communicate in short bursts and spend most of their time asleep using very little power, says ZigBee Alliance chief, Bob Heile.
By cunningly managing power, the transceiver chips in ZigBee devices go for three to five years between battery changes. With Bluetooth, a transceiver battery would be lucky to last a week.
Heile says the first ZigBee products, due out in 2005, will make the slew of infrared remote controls that litter lounges today redundant. A ZigBee PDA will let you control not just the TV, DVD player and hi-fi, but also appliances like the washing machine, kettle and lighting - from anywhere in the house.
But another aspect of ZigBee is likely to make it attractive, too. It can form "mesh" networks in which each device can act like a node, passing data between any number of other devices until it gets to the device that needs it. This is likely to be particularly useful in industry, says Heile. In the event of a fire, say, smoke detectors in a warehouse too far away from the ZigBee base station to raise the alarm directly, would relay the signal via other smoke detectors that are closer. The system has a range of 70 metres. And in the home, meshing could allow wireless ZigBee light switches to double up as sensors for the burglar alarm: crook turns on light, alarm goes off.
Previous attempts to build smart homes have faltered because communications have been slow and insecure. A system marketed by the American retailer Sears in 1978, for instance, used the mains electricity wiring to send signals between appliances. But it never took off because of its slow transmission speed and lack of security: the signals leaked onto the mains supply of neighbours and caused interference. But analysts now think ZigBee has cracked the problem - by combining its low power approach with high speed and optional encryption to prevent this kind of interference.
Chris Ryan, an analyst with Future Horizons, a UK technology consultancy in Sevenoaks, Kent, predicts that by 2009, the average home will have about 65 ZigBee radio chips chirping within it, perhaps with some of them in advanced toys and robots.
And industry will embrace it, too, believes Richard Traherne of UK firm Cambridge Consultants. "One of ZigBee's driving forces is reducing the cost of cabling," he says: wireless ZigBee devices can be placed anywhere, with no cabling needed at all.
But ZigBee will launch without the fanfare that accompanied Bluetooth's arrival in 2000. The ZigBee Alliance is cautious about raising unrealistic expectations about the new technology.
"The fanfare will come but they want to be sure it will work well first," says Traherne's colleague Tim Whittaker.
| |
|
titus
Joined: Jan 19, 2003
Posts: 216
From: Sony Ericsson P910i
PM |
Interestin technology if it takes off. Predictiohs have happened many a times... |
maddav
Joined: Dec 01, 2002
Posts: 356
From: Nottingham, UK
PM |
I read that, it was very interesting, and my mum especially liked the integration into things like lighting, washing machine, and household items, that can be controlled by phone, so when you're away, you can probably control the curtains, and lights to seem like someone is home.
New Scientist is really interesting.
_________________
David
[ This Message was edited by: maddav on 2004-08-18 22:51 ] |
jakester2000
Joined: Jul 09, 2004
Posts: 142
From: London & Gillingham, Kent
PM |
Damnit. as good as it sounds, it just makes me hate technology sometimes. Just when you spend your hard earned cash on something you think will do the job forever a replacement comes out. Still shouldnt complain I guess. |
rdnymllnsktr
Joined: Feb 04, 2004
Posts: > 500
From: California, but now in Plano,
PM, WWW
|
Yes Jakester, I agree. I love the fact that this "ZigBee" drains so much less power than Bluetooth, or should I say, it manages its power supply. That's awesome!!!
MyPhoneExplorer is the new FMA!  http://www.fjsoft.at/en/downloads.php |
plasmadog
Joined: May 06, 2004
Posts: > 500
From: Beantown, India
PM |
zigbee.. it will take a long long time to actually be implemented... and come into our homes.
i remember hearing this thing called bluetooth way back in the late 90s... but its only now that its getting popular. and still most lower end phones don't have bluetooth.
bt isn't dead.. atleast not now |
Asterix
Joined: Aug 19, 2004
Posts: > 500
From: Lima / Peru
PM, WWW
|
Integration and commuication is good, and will be a must for home appliances, but power is the keyword and there BT looses...
T610 Powered |
shyam335
Joined: May 25, 2004
Posts: > 500
From: 127.0.0.1
PM |
I think that there will be a newer protocol from bt SIG that should compete with this technology,im expecting something like that. And such a protocol with backward compatibility can be easily popular than taking the trouble of introducing a new tech. There all are just my opinion and i always welcome new technologies :-) .
This message was posted from a T610 |
Residentevil
Joined: Feb 29, 2004
Posts: > 500
From: Raccoon City, USA
PM, WWW
|
That is exactly what we need. Another buggy wireless network interfering with our cell phones, wifi, 900MHz, 2400MHz and 5800MHz wireless home phones.
Tough times don't last, tough people do!
Free Tibet |
ts_666
Joined: Feb 21, 2002
Posts: 301
From: SWEDEN (actually UK now)
PM |
wonder what "ZigBee" stands for |
vpoil
Joined: May 14, 2002
Posts: 81
From: Toronto, Canada
PM |
In case you guys haven't yet found it - www.zigbee.org |
mojo_jojo
Joined: Aug 11, 2004
Posts: 86
PM |
Sounds very interesting but can be expensive inititally I would have thought. |
vpoil
Joined: May 14, 2002
Posts: 81
From: Toronto, Canada
PM |
@ts_666
In short, the ZigBee standard gets its name from an idea engineers are hoping to emulate: the zigging and zagging of bees, which are individually simple organisms that work together to tackle complex tasks.
**********************************
The ZigBee Principle
**********************************
The domestic honeybee, a colonial insect, lives in a hive that contains a queen, a few male drones, and thousands of worker bees. The survival, success, and future of the colony is dependent upon continuous communication of vital information between every member of the colony. The technique that honey bees use to communicate new-found food sources to other members of the colony is referred to as the ZigBee Principle. Using this silent, but powerful communication system, whereby the bee dances in a zig-zag pattern, he is able to share information such as the location, distance, and direction of a newly discovered food source to its fellow colony members. Instinctively implementing the ZigBee Principle, bees around the world industriously sustain productive hives and foster future generations of colony members.
|
bico
Joined: May 19, 2003
Posts: > 500
From: Stockholm, Sweden.
PM, WWW
|
Sounds really interesting, no doubt about that. But to be widely spread it has to be well priced. I belive that one really big mistake with Bluetooth is the still quite expensive devices and equipments.
The free market and its money makes the rules. Lower the prices and the market will finally wake up.
When the masses really wants it and when they can easily afford it, then the success is a fact.
| |
|
Access the forum with a mobile phone via esato.mobi
|
Posted: 2004-08-18 10:26
