What can the modules be used for?

Monitoring consumption of energy from meter to appliance level, sensing environmental factors to achieve energy and carbon savings. Energy auditing and monitoring. Remote monitoring and environmental parameters such as lux, temperature and humidity. Especially in critical environments such as museums, laboratories, hospitals, control of industrial or agricultural facilities, etc. Building control/automation by integrating the network with the BMS Industrial plants or agricultural farming, sewage treatment plants, etc. You can also create out of the box solutions for buildings with no control using ZB Connections and GreenBox & GreenView.

What is a Zigbee mesh network?

A ZigBee network is based on a mesh structure that allows devices to cover large areas using low power consumption. Each message can dynamically find the path between two nodes using other intermediate nodes to relaunch the message. This achieves a high degree of reliability in maintaining low-powered communication. On the other hand the possibility to send data to the sensors can enable remote programming to achieve maximum flexibility.

What skills are required for installation?

One of the advantages of a wireless sensor mesh network is precisely the ease of installation. Given a set of minimal parameters (distance and obstacles) it is relatively easy to deploy a sensor network. Using repeaters and bridges can extend the maximum distance or third-party devices to connect to the network. Only devices that are able to activate relay outputs need power, and therefore very minimal wiring is required. The device configuration is done quickly and easily by switch that manages the address within the network and identifies the device.

ZigBee or ModBus protocol?

Both. The ZB Connection range of products 4-noks has developed is on the ZigBee protocol for communications management. There is also a compatibility layer for the ModBus network that connects to a SCADA or other application software that supports this protocol. With this design and the use of the bridge device, other devices that operate under the Modbus protocol can also be integrated into the network.

How many network devices can be supported?

Up to 128 devices.

Is it compatible with other ZigBee devices?

Yes 4-noks devices include 2.0 and the ZigBee stack is constructed from Ember technology. However, by default, all include the Modbus protocol.

What is the core transmission technology employed by ZB Connection?

At 2.4GHz, IEEE 802.15.4 radios (which are Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum radios) with frequency hopping modulation techniques applied as well. The result is a point-to-point radio communication that has proven 100% effective in power plants, steel mills and other harsh RF environments.

Do your products require a license?

No. Products offered by Greenologic operate in the internationally license-free 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) frequency band.

What kind of range can be expected?

With the equipment we can usually achieve up to 70 - 100 metres between nodes inside a typical industrial or commercial building not in direct line of sight and up to around 200 metres outside in direct line of sight.

Security is currently a major concern with IT wireless (WiFi) networks. How do wireless sensor networks address this issue?

The designers of the underlying technology standards used in wireless sensor networks (IEEE 802.15.4) were fortunate in being able to address security as part of the design specification rather than having to tackle security retrospectively. As such, the 802.15.4 radio standard builds in AES 128-bit encryption for all traffic. Also, the limited data rates supported by 802.15.4 networks are really not suitable for hacking or eavesdropping activities. It is also possible to lock 802.15.4 radio networks once they have been set up to prevent new devices joining.

As this is a new technology should I not wait until the protocol standards issues are resolved before adopting the technology ?

Although there are several alternative wireless sensor networking protocols marketed by different companies and alliances they all use the IEEE 802.15.4 radio protocol as their foundation and any future standards will also be compliant with 802.15.4. It is therefore very important that any wireless mesh sensor networking hardware is fully compliant with 802.15.4 so that future standards may be adopted. Because of the breadth of the applications for the technology it is very likely that no one ’standard’ will meet all needs since they all are a trade off between different performance factors. Devices will likely be offered with the variant of the standard that is most suitable for the intended application. For example, the domestic market needs low cost whereas the industrial market generally demands higher reliability so protocol standards designs have to reflect this.

Are Greenologic’s products RoHS compliant?

We believe that our products fall into the Control and Monitoring class and as such are exempt