September 2009

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Wailing of Wireless Woes  - While the World Waits

Wailing of Wireless Woes While the World Waits goes on, a great summarization in this article

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Energy Harvesting Smackdown ZigBee vs EnOcean

We all want wireless solutions now, but the the kids are still fighting. :d

The ZigBee Alliance sees EnOcean’s reaction as proof that the EnOcean Alliance’s standard is not really open. “It’s a proprietary user group masquerading as an alliance,” ZigBee Alliance Chairman Bob Heile told us this week. “What they’ve got is not a standard,” he added. “They’ve got a single-company proprietary solution and their alliance is their customer base. So you’ve got our open, publicly available solution with over 300 manufacturers involved vs. one company, one company, one company.”

Reliable Controls EnOcean President Jim O’Callaghan, however, disagrees. “There is a published specification and about 100 companies make products that communicate with other company’s products using that spec,” he said, adding that the EnOcean Alliance is an open, non-discriminatory organization. “One need not purchase product from EnOcean to be part of the EnOcean Alliance,” he said. “And in fact, many members offer software or services to either OEMs, installers or end users.”

The competition between the two is clear in company materials, too. An internal ZigBee Alliance document says: “To bridge the gap with EnOcean a marketing campaign should be considered, with the announcement of a batteryless, maintenance free solution compatible with the current ZigBee standard.”

Regardless of how the groups view each other, Heile said that nothing the ZigBee Alliance is working on flies in the face of EnOcean’s intellectual property. “We are not standardizing or developing harvested energy techniques,” he said. “There are plenty of suppliers for that, EnOcean being one of them. What we are doing is creating extensions to the existing ZigBee stack that would permit OEMs to use a greater selection of available energy-harvesting solutions.”

PLEASE READ COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE

http://earth2tech.com/2009/08/28/energy-harvesting-smackdown-zigbee-vs-enocean/

From a blog

Monday, August 31, 2009

Zigbee, EnOcean, and Energy Harvesting

 
I won't take a lot of space for this one, as interest in this topic is probably narrower than what I usually discuss. This article about Zigbee vs. EnOcean in energy harvesting sensors for building management and energy savings presents some interesting points. Interestingly enough, illumra makes systems with both technologies, and even uses them together in a hybrid (or bridged) configuration. We use Zigbee for the backhaul, and EnOcean for the energy harvesting controls. As always, a disclaimer - I do work for/with illumra, so I'm not a completely objective third party relating to those products.
 

 

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