As the consumer demand shifts to smart home and lighting, the highly flexible smart home and lighting technology applications with ZigBee technology have become the focus of competition among major businesses. A new era of smart home and lighting is coming!
The current trend of the smart lighting without main light design can realize partition lighting, so that the lighting atmosphere can be highly alterable. Compared with traditional lighting, it involves more lights and linkages between switches, gateways, and sensor; and the control system is more complicated. If the network connection is not stable, even the best effect would be in vain. Fortunately, the ZigBee network equipment has a larger capacity and is more stable, the number of lights is not an issue. It can work even if the internet is disconnected.
1 What is ZigBee?
ZigBee is an communication protocol different from Bluetooth and Wifi. Bluetooth and infrared radiation are all wireless communication signals, and Zigbee is one of this kind. So what is the difference? Why is it that ZigBee products are obviously more expensive, yet people are still enthusiastic about ZigBee? Mainly because of its easy networking, low power consumption, high level of security, stability, and node suppor
2 What are the features of ZigBee protocol?
(1) Low power consumption: The Wifi routers we usually use consume very little power, yet the power consumption of ZigBee is much lower, so don’t worry that smart homes will use a lot of electricity. The most powerful thing about ZigBee is its networking function, it can create a local area network at home. That means smart devices can continue to work even if your internet is down. In low-power standby mode, two AA dry batteries can support a node to work for 6-24 months, or even longer. This is the outstanding advantage of ZigBee, by contrast, Bluetooth can work for weeks, WiFi can work for hours.
(2) Low latency: ZigBee has low latency and very good stability, the device will not be paralyzed if the platform server crashes. The response speed of ZigBee is relatively fast. Generally, it only takes 15ms to wake up from sleep mode, and only 30ms for nodes to connect to the network, which further conserve electricity. In comparison, Bluetooth takes 3-10s and WiFi takes 3s.
(3) High level of security: ZigBee provides three levels of security modes, including no security settings, Access Control Lists (ACL) to prevent illegal access to data, and symmetric cryptography with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES128), allowing flexible selection of security attributes based on the characteristics of the product.
(4) High network scalability: It is easy to add new devices to the network. There are three ZigBee Network Topologies: Star, Tree and Mesh. It can scale to hundreds and thousands of devices. If you have lots of devices in your home and requires high stability, we recommend ZigBee protocol products.
As previously stated, ZigBee supports three types of topologies. Devices can be connected to any node to form a larger network structure. One ZigBee network can accommodate 254 slave devices and one master device. ZigBee network can accommodate 65,000 devices at the most.
① Star Topology
In a Star Network Configuration, there is one Coordinator and multiple end nodes with no routers. All the End Devices are connected to the Coordinator and the individual End Devices are isolated. No direct communication between end devices.
② Tree Topology
A tree topology is a star network where coordinators and end nodes are far away and routers need to be added. Its transmission principle is similar to that of a pyramid, with the coordinator at the top. Equipment at the upper level communicate one-way to those at the lower level, and equipment at different levels cannot communicate with each other.
However, these two types of topology have a poor performance in relaying communication signals, so they need to add repeaters when outfitting big villas. If the repeater on one floor fails, it will affect the operation of the entire floor, including the above floors.
③ Mesh Topology
The ZigBee Mesh Topology is also a Peer-to-Peer Topology. Coordinator, routers, terminal nodes can all act as a repeater and communicate with each other. Packets can go through up to 16 hops to reach their destination by middle devices. So in a villa case, we are able to make it without a repeater. A host can operate stably.
3 Applications of Zigbee Technology
ZigBee has a wide range of application, including industrial automation, home automation, automotive automation, agricultural automation, medical automation and logistics management. Examples of practical applications are as follows: lighting control, environmental control, various types of curtain control, smoke sensors, medical monitoring systems, large air conditioning systems, set-top boxes with built-in home control system and universal remote controls, etc. In addition, it can also locate moving targets in local areas such as vehicles in cities.
4 The role of ZigBee in commercial lighting
Wireless Smart Home System of Mibang Lighting adopts the most cutting edge ZigBee technology. It only needs to be powered through traditional electric wire to work. The indoor lighting system designed with ZigBee technology realizes single light control, group lights control, full lights control and adaptive lighting, which improves the intelligent level and greatly reduces the energy consumption. Light sensors can sharply capture the change of ambient light and automatically adjust the brightness of lights to create a cozy lighting experience.
5 Setting up a pattern
① Smart Home Bright Mode
② Smart Home Movie Mode
③ Smart Home Party Mode
turn off the other lights
④ Smart Home Leisure Mode
(warm white light)
⑤ Smart Home Romantic Mode
⑥Smart Home Sleep Mode
When used in home lighting environment, it requires to control multiple LED lamps at the same time. For Bluetooth or WiFi, it is difficult to realize synchronous control of multiple nodes. ZigBee has obvious advantages in this case. That is the reason why ZigBee is actively introduced to both smart lighting and smart home.
