Can we perform commissioning nRF52840 DK (Zigbee device) using the third party device as coordinator (Zigbee coordinator)

[venkatesh dyagala]

Hi,

Iam running the BLE uart and Zigbee light multi protocol example. Using the latest thread and Zigbee SDK v3.2.0. The example is quite good. That the door(Zigbee+BLE) device is controlled by ble device and zigbee device.

So for commissioning we want to third party coordinator. Is it possible to commissioning the Zigbee end device ? If yes, am excited to know, what are the major changes we need to look and configure for the third party coordinator (for ex: Channel, etc). So that the coordinator should join our Zigbee + BLE device into the Zigbee network.

Can you suggest any third party coordinators ?

Thanks,

venkatesh

[Marjeris Romero]

Hi Venkatesh,

Yes, but there is a couple of things you should be aware of. You need to make sure that the 3rd party coordinator has support for Zigbee 3.0 stack and support network steering commissioning.

You should also change the radio channel used by the SDK example. All of our examples uses radio channel 16 for test and debugging purposes. For production firmware or for use with 3rd party devices, such as Amazon Echo Plus devices, it is strongly advised 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.

Can you suggest any third party coordinators ?

Personally I haven't tried any other third party coordinators except for Amazon Echo Plus, which has worked almost out of the box with several of the examples from the SDK when changing the channel mask. But at the same time I have also found some limitations in the Echo Plus as a coordinator, for instance when it comes to handling more than one cluster in a device.

If you plan to create a device tailored for the Alexa enviroment I recommend taking a look at the Amazon Alexa developer site Echo Plus Zigbee Support. 

Some Devzone users (for example here) have also report using the Smarthings hub as a third party coordinator with sucess, but I haven't tried this myself yet.

Best regards,

Marjeris

[venkatesh dyagala]

Thanks for the info.

I would like to ask that can we change the commissioning mode from network steering to touchlink in the Zigbee coordinator example ? If yes what are the changes we need to do along with it ?

By looking into the below API. Am thinking that could be possible right

zb_bool_t bdb_start_top_level_commissioning (zb_uint8_t mode_mask)

Thanks,

venkatesh

[Marjeris Romero]

Hi Venkatesh,

Unfortunately we do not support Touchlink commissioning in our current SDK .

Best regards,

Marjeris