Analysis of the practical application of Zigbee technology

With the advent of the Internet of Things, the automation and intelligence of urban transportation require a comprehensive upgrade. Traditional street lamps are gradually being replaced, and the stability, reliability and convenience of new intelligent street lamp control systems are receiving more and more attention.

Usually in street light control systems, street lights are powered by solar energy, with strict power consumption requirements. The distance between street light nodes varies from 20 to 200 meters. In each system network, the number of street lights under the gateway is controlled within 1,000, and on-site construction requires simple and convenient operation.

Figure 1 Street light real scene

Project proposals

In this project, the ZLG Zhiyuan electronic control panel is used as the centralized controller of the street light system. It uses GPRS/4G technology to establish a connection with the remote server center, controls the on-site lights through the ZigBee wireless network, and receives the street light status data returned by the street light nodes.

 Street light node: Each street light has a ZLG ZM series ZigBee module, which acts as both a node and a router, forming a communication network within a certain area.

  Gateway controller: The gateway controller can directly use the ZLG Zhiyuan Electronics industrial control host for edge computing to control and process data of street light nodes;

Data transmission terminal: Since the gateway controllers are distributed in various areas and are usually far away from the server host, and all street light data need to be managed in a unified manner, GPRS/4G DTU is used as a bridge between the local area network and the wide area network.

As shown in the figure, each street lamp is controlled by a ZigBee wireless network.

Figure 2 Street light control system block diagram

The centralized street light controller in the project uses the Cortex-A series core board of ZLG Zhiyuan Electronics, and the ZigBee wireless module adopts the ZM32 series products.

product description

The ZM32 series is a series of low-power, high-reliability ZigBee modules developed by ZLG Zhiyuan Electronics based on Silicon labs EFR32MG1B series wireless SoCs, and provides a complete application integration solution based on the IEEE802.15.4 standard ISM frequency band.

The product has been inspected and certified by a series of authoritative RF instruments, and combined with years of market experience and the actual needs of users in this industry, the extremely complex communication protocol of wireless products is integrated into the built-in MCU, supporting serial port transparent transmission mode, and integrating fast and easy-to-use self-organizing network functions, providing multiple configurable AD, IO, and PWM interfaces, simplifying the complex development process of wireless products, allowing your products to be quickly put on the market at a lower cost. Due to its ultra-small size and ultra-low power consumption design, it is widely used in various smart devices.

Figure 3 ZM32 module physical picture

Product Parameters

Frequency range: 2400~2483.5MHz  

Operating voltage: 2.4~3.8 V  

Receiving current: 13.5mA  

Sleep current: 2.3uA  

Emission current: 74mA 

Transmitting power: 19dBm  

Receiving sensitivity: -99dBm  

Transmission rate: 250kbps  

Ipex interface, stamp hole pad interface  

Using UART communication interface  

Support sleep and wake-up  

Temperature range: -40~+85℃

Rapid Development

The module supports serial port command operation mode. The serial port commands are divided into permanent parameter configuration and temporary parameter configuration. It allows more network configurations such as allowing networking, prohibiting networking, querying routing tables, kicking nodes, etc. Users only need to operate simple serial port data to complete the wireless part development.