Progress in the open-source Zigbee world - touchlink pairing

I got my hands on some Tradfri devices finally and made good progress talking to them. That's an unmodified Tradfri remote initiating a touchlink pairing with a kw41z board running RIOT-OS and a fork of the old open-source ZBOSS Zigbee stack that I've started updating to support modern off-the-shelf Zigbee devices like Tradfri.

I think this is the first time that open-source-only code has been used to do a touchlink pairing with an off-the-shelf Zigbee device, so I think it's pretty exciting. There's no Xbee module, no closed vendor-provided libraries, no third-party commercial Zigbee stack, no binary blobs at all. All of the code running on the microcontroller is accessible and modifiable, including 100% of the Zigbee functionality. This makes me super happy.

So I did say I was starting to add support. The reason I didn't show off toggling the light with the on/off button is that nothing after the touchlink pairing is implemented yet. But it's pretty cool progress and I wanted to share. Anyway that's all for now.

7 Comments

now dragon

June 19, 2023, 1:16 a.m.

What compiler is used ?

Francis

Feb. 27, 2020, 2:21 p.m.

Any updates?

Ross Reedstrom

March 24, 2020, 12:23 p.m.

Well, benemorius shared this link as a comment in a github issue, so I guess it's ok to amplify it to his own site: https://imgur.com/cdZd9je

shows using ikea switch to turn LED on a wk41z board on and off. I presume that's the ROIT Z-BOSS port.

I'm very interested in this project - I was looking for something like the ubiquitous esp8266/esp32 boards everyone is using for projects, but targeting battery powered sensors, which lead me to zigbee, which eventually found this!

I'm going to buy a couple of your kw41z-mini boards (and possibly/probably a Raspberry Pi 802.15.4 radio) to take a look at RIOT and your work porting Z-BOSS over. I think the combo of RIOT and zigbee may be a very nice win: open source advantages for the low-power device end, and commercial/consumer device compatibility to ease adoption (and not force you to build everything yourself)

benemorius

March 26, 2020, 4:55 p.m.

Thanks for posting that. Sorry for the lack of updates. Life got weird last year but it hasn't completely stopped me on this. I did get all of the basic ZLL functionality working and although there are still plenty of bugs I hope it's close to being able to merge into Riot as a package so it can get a little more developer attention.

JanosAudron

Oct. 5, 2022, 6:49 a.m.

Hey There, any recent updates? Did you manage to merge your changes to RIOT?
Engery Crysis is getting the best of us at home and I'm evaluating my Options and considering to go with Zigbee for our heating and energy monitoring setup, also really interested in supporting development, but I just can't afford timewise to build for several weeks day by day to get something to work... my wife will kill me :D

Adam

June 5, 2019, 1:42 p.m.

This is pretty exciting and that Tradfri device is surprisingly inexpensive! Looking forward to seeing further progress posts.

June 6, 2019, 10:06 p.m.

Yeah it's my first experience with Ikea electronics and they didn't let me down. I'd be impressed with the remote at any price, but for $15 I think it's a steal. I only got it so I'd have a proper device to test with but I think I'll have to get a few more and actually put them to use now that it's (well, almost) possible to use them with noncommercial stuff too.

More updates should be forthcoming, although I've had such an unusual abundance of free time lately that for once I might actually be getting burned out on doing the fun stuff. I probably need to check in with real life and maybe even do some adulting pretty soon here.