Subtitles of the Movie

One more wireless technology that we'll talk abut is ZigBee. Now, ZigBee has kind of a strange name and a lot people, in fact, haven't even heard of it. Basically it's used widely in the industrial type of, uh, sector and basically it's a wireless technology that was designed for automation systems, control and monitoring systems. It follows the IEEE 802.15.4 standards, which were approved in April of 2003. It uses direct secret spread spectrum as its modulation. The ZigBee Alliance is a group of manufacturers that basically certify devices so that they can be made sure that, uh, devices are interoperable and they adhere to the standards for ZigBee. Now, these ZigBee devices can be networked in a WPAN architecture and they can contain up to 65,536 nodes. So you can basically set up an entire factory or a house, in fact, with these devices that can control a wide variety of things automatically; alarms, timers and so forth. Now ZigBee is not interoperable with Bluetooth or 802.11 standards. When you use ZigBee in a home automation scheme or a factory automation scheme, again, you can operate light switches, alarm timers, machinery can be, uh, programmed to come on and off and it's all wireless. These devices are normally low-power, always-on type of devices that run from standard AA or AAA batteries. So they don't consume very much power and, again, they don't have a wide range. Now, normally you won't just go out and buy ZigBee devices. Normally these are used in businesses or, or a business might sell automation schemes. So the average user is probably not going to see these too much. You may not see them. But it's a good idea, it's a good thing to know that they exist if you find yourself being asked to work in a ZigBee environment; you might want to do some more research and find out more about it.