The Connectivity Standards Alliance, the international community of nearly 600 companies committed to open standards for the Internet of Things, this month announced the release of Zigbee Direct.
This new feature of Zigbee combines the ease-of-use and accessibility of Bluetooth Low Energy technology to simplify the onboarding of new, and control of existing Zigbee devices.
For consumers who often use Bluetooth Low Energy devices like phones and smart speakers, Zigbee Direct provides a new avenue, without the use of the cloud or a hub, for these devices to communicate directly with a large ecosystem of Zigbee devices.
Integration of the Zigbee PRO mesh technology provides reliability, performance, and interoperable transport for a large Zigbee application library. Simultaneously, the ubiquitous presence of Bluetooth Low Energy in controllers like hubs, smartphones, and tablets, simplifies the onboarding and control of devices.
Zigbee is a standards-based wireless technology developed to enable low-cost, low-power wireless machine-to-machine and Internet of Things networks.
While Zigbee has been in the marketplace for more than two decades, work on the protocol stack is actively ongoing and growing in scope with the release of revision 23 expected later in 2023.
Over one billion Zigbee chipsets have been sold with hundreds of companies continuing to build and deploy products. In 2022 alone, more than 400 Zigbee products and platforms were certified with more than 4,700 certified over its lifespan to date.
Jon Harros, head of certification and testing at the Connectivity Standards Alliance, remarked:
“The release of the Zigbee Direct certification program is great news for application developers and product manufacturers that want to simplify design and development while greatly enhancing and streamlining the user experience. Both new and existing Zigbee users can now control or set up new products with Bluetooth devices they already have, including simplified onboarding for large networks used in commercial applications.”
Thanks and acknowledgements
Zigbee Direct joins the growing family of Zigbee solutions including Zigbee, Zigbee Smart Energy, and Green Power, the Alliance’s low energy consumption solution. Learn more about Zigbee Direct and the Zigbee family of solutions.
As stated by a CSA press release, "The Alliance recognizes the successful launch of Zigbee Direct would not have been possible without the support of the more than 50 member companies who joined this journey, including the following member companies who lent their time and talent directly to the creation of the Zigbee Direct specification Amazon, Bureau Veritas Consumer Products Services, DEKRA, DSR Corporation, Exegin Technologies Ltd, Landis Gyr AG, Nordic Semiconductor ASA, Signify Netherlands B V, Silicon Labs, Somfy, STMicroelectronics SAS, Texas Instruments, and ubisys technologies GmbH."
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