Make a Zigbee devices

Devices
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As I have several Zigbee devices at home now I want to know a bit more on how it really is working and what it takes to make a device.
Like for example you have a ESP8266 for the WiFi.
Is there a way to make my own Zigbee device or is that not doable because i need to register it do where.

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You mean to make an actual physical device? It’s not terribly difficult (or expensive), there’s a configurable Zigbee firmware project that allows you to create a custom Zigbee device based on cheap hardware (CC2530, which is the same chip that Homey uses and costs a few €€€ from Aliexpress).

I haven’t yet tried it myself but it’s on my TODO list.

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Read a while ago also about a Hubitat zigbee sensor project, Hubitat with Homemade Temperature, Humidity, Pressure and Light sensor - Here's a cool thing I did! - Hubitat. So, it is possible for sure. Maybe smoother to use the project @robertklep is referring to, hehe.

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Thanks for the info.
Also saw the solution of @robertklep
Maybe let’s give that a try.

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For me it’s however so much smoother to continue with just esp8266 and wifi, and then power all arduino projects with the IKEA zigbee repeater. But it’s always fun with new projects. Hehe.

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Zigbee is doable. It all begins with NordicSemi’s nRF52 series of microcontrollers. These microcontrollers feature an 802.15.4 radio. Nordic further more provides an SDK for Zigbee and Thread which is based on ZBOSS. It’s relatively easy to develop a device based on this platform - provided you are an experienced firmware developer that knows his/her way around C.

The nRF52840 is the workhorse of the nRF52 family. It costs ca. €3 in 1k+ quantities, so it’s not a really expensive chip. There’s a full size development board available for ca. €40 and a much smaller dongle for ca. €9.

One of the best things in the NordicSemi ecosystem is the availability of the excellent SEGGER Embedded Studio toolchain which is free for use with the nRF52. Since the nRF52840-DK provides an on-board SEGGER J-Link compatible debug probe, the total development environment is very, very affordable.

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So it is maybe not so hard to make as I was thinking.
Only needs some time and a case of beer :wink:

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Came around with exactly the same question as OP. Glad you answered it already!

Thanks for elaborating. You gave me some great Google Keywords to find all the NordicSemi pages for an first impression.

As you seem knowledgeable to the domain, may I ask some more questions?

  • are there any online communities / forums / discord servers where people developing in this area hang around?

  • just from the software side, how complicated or how complex would it be to create a ZigBee repeater out of a nRF52840? Is it only some library initialization? Or is there the need of developing an application to forward the data? I would assume it should be only library initialization, as every creator of a ZigBee router device would have to reinvent the wheel here.

Thanks for your time!

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There has been a change in the software setup Nordic supports - they have gone all out Zephyr. Zephyr’s learning curve is quite steep, but the project is still doable provided you are experienced in embedded systems. See Zigbee - nordicsemi.com and Zigbee — nRF Connect SDK 2.1.99 documentation

Communities: Nordic DevZone probably. reddit: r/embedded, r/zigbee, r/iot. Perhaps there are others.

A zigbee repeated isn’t difficult - in essence any zigbee device powered from mains is a repeater. Setting up zigbee needs a lot more tinkering than just calling init() so I think it is a little more than just an init() call to a library. However, there’s a lot of examples from nordic, so it could be as simple as copy/paste.