XBee ZB coordinator for 3rd-party ZigBee with 16-bit PAN IDs and different frame

XBee & XBee Gateway
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1

Hi All,

I am working with an XStick Series 2/ZB attempting to coordinate devices running a simplified ZigBee stack, most likely ZigBee 2006 running on a Microchip MRF24J40MA. They are using short destination addressing, hard-coded to respond on Channel 11 on PAN ID 09 09. The device I am testing has a destination address of 03 03. It looks like they are using a MAC Frame, which is looking for the following:

01 08: Frame control: data type packet, short destination addressing
XX: Sequence number for ACKs, right now using 01
09 09: Destination PAN ID
03 03: Destination short MAC address
XX XX XX XX XX XX: The data payload
FF: Filler byte before the frame check sequence
XX XX: FCS

Right now I have my XBee ZB configured as follows:
Firmware: 21A7 ZigBee Coordinator API
ID: 0
SC: 1
ZS: 1
OP: 909 (Set through II: 09 09)
CH: B (Set through SC: 1)
AP: 2
AO: 1
BD: 9600 [3]

Those are the settings I’ve been able to piece together by looking in the documentation, various forums, etc. However, I am not able to get the device to respond to a packet generated through the frames generator in XCTU. A few questions:

  1. If OP is set to 909, does it matter what the 64-bit PAN is? If it is set to 0, as currently, a random PAN is assigned.
  2. Digi generates its own frame, with the start delimiter 7E, etc. Is it possible the microchip sees this extraneous information and rejects the packet? If so, is it possible to just send the standard MAC frame the device is looking for?
  3. I’m not sure that my settings for AO and ZS are appropriate for this type of communication. Can you advise on this?
  4. When I attempt to generate frames, I specify 0x10 Transmit Request under the ZigBee Protocol with API 2 (API Mode with Escapes) selected. I leave the 64-bit dest address as 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00, give the 16-bit address 03 03, and put the data payload in the RF Data-Hex box. Am I doing anything inappropriate here?

Any help or guidance in getting these two devices communicating is appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Greg

2

It looks like this device has been written to work with a specific device only. I don’t think you are going to get it to talk to the XBee as we do not use the short address for addressing. We don’t do that as the 16 bit network address is dynamic and assigned by the Coordinator.