This study has the primary objective to investigate whether or not the wireless technology ZigBee is suitable for industry usage. The project work has been done in collaboration with Binar Elektronik AB (Trollhättan, Sweden). The background story for this collaboration is that Binar is interested in finding out if ZigBee is suitable for one of their upcoming products.
The study is divided into four main parts, beginning with a researching part concerning ZigBee as a concept and a market research on ZigBee hardware. The thesis continuous with a specialization towards one ZigBee hardware, the ZigBee module from MaxStream called Xbee. The Xbee module was chosen based on the result from the market research. This part also describes the code that has been developed for the Xbee module, which main purpose is to simplify communication with the module.
The next part of the study contains a number of different field tests that show how ZigBee communication is affected in different environments. This part also includes a range test with the Xbee module.
The last part of the thesis contains the final results and conclusions, which clearly show that the ZigBee technology, and Xbee in particular, has a potential to satisfy the requirements for a wireless system in an industrial environment. This conclusion concerning the industrial usability of ZigBee should however be seen in the light of this particular thesis work, making this conclusion viable only for the field test environments.
Source: Linköping University
Author: Wettergren, Andreas
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