Creating a Binding locally on a Zigbee device

[Jon]

Hello,

I am porting several of our devices which implement ZCL from another stack vendor to run on Nordic. These are legacy devices that support Report Configuration/Reportable Attributes but require that these attribute reports be sent to the coordinator even if there is no ZDO Binding Request from the coordinator.

To accomplish this, on our previous implementations added the coordinator to the binding table locally within the device (e.g. emberBindingSet()). This allowed attributes that are configured for reporting to send attribute reports to the coordinator even without an explicit binding_req from the coordinator.

How can I manipulate (add an entry) to the device's binding table from the device itself? I realize that I can manually construct my own attribute report and send it to the coordinator using the zb_aps_send_user_payload() API, but this approach doesn't make sense if the ZB stack already has code to construct ATTRIBUTE_REPORT messages.

Two pieces of information will be useful here:

1) How to add an entry to the binding table

2) How to cause an attribute report to be generated manually and be sent to a specified address using the stack code (i.e., without having to manually construct the payload myself).

Thanks,

Jon

[Edvin]

Hello,

Can you please check the testing description for the multisensor example in the Zigbee SDK. Here you see what commands you can use in the CLI example to set bindings and subscriptions. Then you can see what functions the different CLI commands are calling in the CLI example. 

1) check the description in the multisensor example.

2) I am not sure I understand this question. 

Best regards,

Edvin

[Jon]

Edvin,

As far as I can tell, the CLI only supports sending a Binding *request* (e.g., the "binding on" command will sent a ZDO.BIND request to another node). What I need to do is create a binding locally within the device (since I am in a situation where another node will *not* be sending me a binding request). This is supported by other Zigbee stacks -- as an example, see https://docs.silabs.com/zigbee/6.6/em35x/group-binding-table).

Regarding item #2: I would like to send an ATTRIBUTE_REPORT command manually. I can certainly do this by writing all of the code necessary to build a header, add all of the attributes and their types, etc. However, I sould expect that the stack already has such code internally since the stack is able to send attribute reports when attributes are configured to report to other bindings. How can I use this code. For example, see the emberAfFillCommandGlobalServerToClientReportAttributes API documented in https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/miscellaneous/AF-V2-API.pdf), which builds a REPORT_ATTRIBUTES payload suitable for sending.

Thanks,

Jon

[Jon]

Any updates on this? Thanks

[Edvin]

Hello Jon,

I have filed your question to our Zigbee Team. I am waiting on a reply from them.

Regarding your #2, this looks like something that is done in the attribute report function, zb_zcl_set_attr_val(...), which is used in e.g. the multi_sensor example found in:

SDK\examples\zigbee\experimental\multi_sensor.

I will let you know as soon as I hear something from our Zigbee team.

BR,

Edvin

[Jon]

Yeah unfortunately the zb_zcl_set_attr_val(...) function is not what I need (unless I am able to manually add to the binding table) since this function changes the attribute but does not provide me with a buffer that I can send manually to an address.