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Is it required for a mobile phone to have a dedicated Zigbee chip in order to be a Zigbee node (coordinator/router/endnode) ?

If yes, then, I guess there should be a driver module for it as well ?

I don't know about the exact HW structure of mobile phones; in laptop we have a wlan card with its own antenna and driver; how about mobile phone ? there are separate wifi, gps and bluetooth chips with separate driver modules for each, and all sharing the same antenna ?

Thanks

mangusta
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  • I've just answered a similar question here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/16985211/1752548. Hope it helps. – Asier Jun 07 '13 at 13:26

3 Answers3

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Yes, even though several wireless technologies (WIFI, Bluetooth, ZigBee) can work in the same 2,4 GHz frecuency, you still need a transceiver (transmiter and receiver chip) which supports specifically this technology. In the case of ZigBee, you need an IEEE-802.15.4-compliant transceiver chip.

The idea of including a ZigBee module in one phone is quite interesting. However, I am afraid that you will not find many phones like this. May this change in the future? I have no clue.

Could you give us please more information about your Project? On these kind of projects you usually do not need your phone to be part of the ZigBee network. The coordinator could be connected to one normal PC, and you can provide access to the ZigBee network through an web application. From this application you can serve all data gathered in the network, see the status of the nodes and even send commands.

Another possibility, is to create a network bridge between two technologies, so you can plug a ZigBee chip to your phone through USB, WIFI, Bluetooth, Android port, ... But in this case, unless you find a final product, you will have to assemble some chips and write some code.

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At this point in time for ZigBee support the hardware will require a separate IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver chip (802.15.4 is the underlying protocol that ZigBee uses). The most common frequency for operating ZigBee is the 2.4GHz band common to WiFi and Bluetooth, so in theory one chip and antenna could provide unified WiFi + Bluetooth + 802.15.4... but to the best of my knowledge there is nothing on the market (yet). There are however unified Bluetooth+Wifi chips (eg RaLink RT3592BC8). GPS always uses a separate antenna/chip because it operates on a different frequency band.

jdesbonnet
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I've answered a similar question here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16985211/1752548

It's about using an SDIO Zigbee card in an android device. I haven't managed to make them work yet, but it looks promising. Hope it helps

Community
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Asier
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