This time I take a look at development kit offerings from Ember, Jennic, and Oki Semiconductor. As with most 802.15.4 or ZigBee kits, these take a while to set up simply because of the number of components within the system. Luckily, everything tends to be identical so a network can be up-and-running within an hour or two. Of course, development work takes a bit longer.
Ember’s offering uses their EM260 transceiver. The kit is comparable to the EM250 that moves the microcontroller and transceiver into a single chip. Both use the same protocol stack with Ember’s enhancements but the underlying processor is different. In this case, the EM260 is paired with an 8-bit Atmel AVR processor.
Read the reviews:
A ZigBee InSight
32-bit RISCy ZigBee
Large RAM ZigBee