Zigbee Light Control Example

[davorin]

Good morning

Our company is using nrf52840 devices with BLE-mesh and asked me if I could have a look at the Zigbee functionality for adding Alexa compatability.

So got me some nrf52840 dongles and programmed one with the pca10059 hex file from the nrf5 Zigbee SDK.

Only in the main.c file I could see some description like:

"Button event used to enter the Bulb into the Identify mode"

But even when pressing this button neither Philips Hue nor the Echo Show 2nd generation can find the Zigbee device.

Is there something missing here?

thanks in advance

richard

[Marjeris Romero]

Hi Richard,

Sorry for the late reply. All of our SDK examples uses Zigbee channel 16 as default. For use with 3rd party devices, such as Amazon Echo, it is strongly advise to set the IEEE_CHANNEL_MASK (located in files named main.c of each example) to cover multiple channels. For example set IEEE_CHANNEL_MASK to 0x07fff800U, in order to use all 802.15.4 defined channels.

The identify mode is for implementing EZ-mode finding and binding. You should not need to press any button in the nRF52840 dongle for commissioning, just use voice command "Alexa, discover my devices" once you have flashed the dongle.

Interaction with Phillips Hue can be more tricky. Phillips Hue bulbs can be commissioned into a network in two ways: touchlink commissioning (used for simple combination of light bulb + light switch) or Network steering commissioning. Our examples only support Network steering commissioning. For this commissioning mode you need a hub or coordinator (for example Amazon Echo or a Nordic DK running one of our coordinator examples). You can comission the Phillips hue bulb into the same network as the Amazon echo and Nordic light bulb and then control both bulbs using voice commands with the Amazon Echo.

Going forward I also recommend setting up one of the nRF52840 dongles to run our 802.15.4 sniffer to help you debug your Zigbee connections. Using the sniffer you can find out which channel does the Echo use to create it's network, and you will be able to see the node joining process for example.

Best regards,

Marjeris