Zigbee network creation and addressing

Hi all,

I’m a student in a French (I apologize for my bad english, hoping you will understand) school of electronics, and four coworkers and I have a project about Zigbee home automation. As we have chosen our subject ourself, teachers cannot help us.

Our project is to create a “mother board” (based on a Raspberry PI) commendable with an android smartphone or a web page. With this motherboard, we create two “daughter boards”, very simple in a first time : just a button actioned by the user and a daughter board controlling a on/off lamp. The motherboard and daughter boards communicate in a Zigbee Network. In this network, the motherboard is the coordinator. First we will do only end devices.

As this project is about Home automation, we have chosen Zigbee Home automation as our profile. Furthermore, we use Xbee Modules.

We have some issues with addressing and network creation. For the moment, we do not have written any code, it’s only “paper work”.
The first issue we have is about PAN ID. In the Zigbee Home automation documentation, Startup parameters precise PAN ID = 0xFFFF and ExtentedPAN ID = 0x0000000000000000. But this is the only place in the document where PAN ID is mentioned. Moreover, there is no PAN ID in ZCL or ZDO frames. How does a device in the network know that this frame is for him and not for a neighbor network?

Then, I have read somewhere that the 16-bit address can be changed. For instance, the startup parameters precise Short Address = 0xFFFF, so, it will be changed (by the coordinator probably ?) … we do not have found any function for re-adressing this 16-bit address in the Zigbee Specification (but we don’t have read the 600 pages at this moment). Could you help us and explain how it works ?

thank you for having read these questions and for your answers

Damien Vallini

The PAN ID function is a command that is listed within the radios parameters that is used for Associating and network formation. It does not have a ZCL or ZDO function as thoughts function occur after the network has been formed. In the XBee wold, the PAN ID can be set with the ID parameter.