This kit consists of three eZ430-RF2480 target boards plus a MSP-eZ430U USB dongle interface and a couple of battery powered modules. The user connects one of the target boards to the USB dongle and the other two to the battery powered modules. This is everything you will need to build your own small test ZigBee network. Each target board consists of a MSP430F2274 microcontroller and a CC2480 network processor which communicate using SPI. There are also 5 GPIO lines available to use on the microcontroller.
The total documentation that arrived with the kit consisted of a single A4 sheet describing how to launch a specially written Sensor Monitor program on a Microsoft Windows compatible PC by downloading software from the development kits web page located at ..
The instructions were easy to follow and within 5 minutes I had a working ZigBee network consisting of a coordinator (the USB dongle) , a router and an end device (the battery powered target boards). In the demonstration application these display their temperatures and battery voltages as shown in the screen shot below ..
I'm usually pleasantly surprised by the range of these low powered 2.4 GHz radio systems and ZigBee didn't disappoint me as I found a target board could communicate through two brick walls in my 1950's built workplace. ZigBee extends this range further as its nodes automatically create networks to pass data between themselves. I can see this feature being very useful for my work which sometimes consists of designing sensors for use in the semiconductor clean rooms which pass data to a Texas central server via a radio link. In the past I used 433 MHz and then Bluetooth technology for this link but neither requires as little current as ZigBee and none can automatically form networks so I am keen to investigate this technology.
Sadly the main drawback to this kit was the lack of documentation. As I mentioned earlier this consisted of a single A4 sheet of paper and web address. Annoyingly even the web site isn't that well organised and it took me a while to find the best documentation on the kit which is in a file called swru151a.pdf. If this document had been included in with the kit it would have saved me a lot of time and would have made it much friendly. Also when using the kit make sure you connect the target boards to the USB dongle and battery boards correctly. The connector isn't polarized and it is easy to connect them the wrong way. When you do this the target board becomes very warm but thankfully wasn't damaged when I accidentally did this for a few seconds a couple of times.
That small drawback aside this has to be the best ZigBee development kit I have come across so far and I will certainly be using it to prototype a number of projects I have planned in the future.
