Adding Zigbee Radio to NSLU2 (Slug)

Overview

The project illustrates the deployment of Zigbee radio on a small Linux box like the NSLU2 known as the Slug.

Explanation

Zigbee is a short-range radio standard that uses the 2.4GHz microwave band along with wireless Ethernet and Bluetooth. It is most suited for low-power applications that involve simple microcontrollers since its basic parameters are a data rate of up to 250kbits/s with a 50m range. The Slug is a 266MHz processor where the file system resides on a USB flash drive that would be responsible for logging data sent by remote sensors, generating graphs on web pages, and others.

The RF chip is very small while the F-shaped PCB is the aerial. The microcontroller is located in the center of the fixing post and to the left are the USB-to-Serial FT232 chip and EEPROM for the USB configuration data. When the Zigbee is plugged into the Slug, the host board appears as USB serial device using the FTDI kernel module.

The DLP-designed modules were used since they have both an RF chip and a microcontroller. One of its features is that it can be programmed for a very low power sleep mode.