Greetings
I am working on street light control project, and it is in its development stage. Turning point where we need to decide if we’re going to use wireless or power line communication.
Current goal is to find a way to control every lamp in one block independetly, and, optionaly, to have feedback of any lamp’s status (turned on, turned power saving mode, or turned off).
Central station for one block needs to be able to send commands to 40 remote stations (lamp post). Every lamp has two selectable modes of operation (full power and power saving mode), so, every remote station should have 2 relay outputs.
Street block isn’t longer than 1000 meters (3000 ft), and have no more than 40 lamps (optical visibility and straight line).
That would be brief project description.
Now, for my question 
Is there development kit (pair of microcontrollers with ZigBee) that I could get my hands on? Or do you have something more suitable for my needs?
Thank you for your time!
Regards, Muhamed Avdic
Hi,
If you can design your circuit in that way, so that you can use XBee ZB module DIO pins to turn on and turn of the relay. The best thing to use in that case would be XBee Pro DIO Adapter to turn ON and Turn Off Relay Output. DIO Adapter can provide more voltage output, and that would be ok for relay operation.
So, To turn on and turn off the relay you can send remote AT command from the Coordinator to All DIO Routers. e.g. ATD04 — DIO low, ATD05 — DIO High. To send the remote AT commands to the Routers, You will need Coordinator in the API mode.
You can use either broadcast mode to turn ON, turn OFF relay Output. Or You can also use Unicast mode to turn ON and Turn Off specific lights.
If you are looking for Coordinator with Microcontroller than XBee-Pro S2B Programmable modules are also available, which has built in Freescale controller interfaced with EM250 RF chip. So, you can directly write your on code to control whole project in simple C using Code Warrior IDE. You can also Interface different DIOs and AIOs to know current Power Input to deside whether low power mode is required or normal mode? Or using Sensor interface you can also deside, whether to turn ON the lights or Turn Off. Even you can also provide UART Interface from the PC to manually Turn ON and Turn OFF the lights.
Other good way for the Coordinator is use of ConnectPort X2/ X4, which also provide Internet or Intranet Connectivity to XBee and also you can access the XBee from any where in the world using iDigi Secured Cloud Services. Here Python Programming Environment is provided, which reduces Time to Market. Take care while buying X2. Check the features, with which built in module it will be shipped and XBee Inside is working with which RF protocol.? I really like X2/ X4. And I like ConnectPort X3 and ConnectPort X4 due to Cellular Connectivity Option in some of the models.