ZigBee Network Evaluation/Developer Board (zNED)

Oki's zNED board has been designed to meet a broad spectrum of evaluation scenarios. In addition to providing the basic radio link functionality zNED has been designed to sense motion in three dimensions, measure temperature and detect ambient light levels.

ZNED provides three user definable momentary switches, three user definable display LEDs, a RS-232 port and for more sophisticated user interfaces, has an option for connecting a two line by sixteen character LCD display. Realizing that some functions of the developers system may require custom hardware a 16-pin expansion port with power, I2C, A/D and GPIO has been provided to interface with developer built peripheral boards.

To support application program development zNED has incorporated a full JTAG interface to the MCU. zNED also includes three options for powering the board; wall power, battery power, or power from USB via the JLINK JTAG host interface adapter provided in the kit. zNED makes use of a modular design concept to enhance flexibility and future proof the system, by partitioning the radio functionality to a pluggable radio board.

This modular radio concept will allow for various radio boards, enabling easy evaluation of various antenna choices and radio power transmission options without the need to purchase multiple zNED boards. It also allows for the radio board to be re-used with customers' proof of concept or prototype systems removing the complexity of RF design from the product and allowing for a known good radio board to be used during the proof of concept and prototyping phases of product design.

Additionally future radio boards from Oki may be used with the zNED board. zNED was also design to consider long life battery operation modes. To facilitate long life all sensors can be power down from the MCU, the MCU has an internal real time clock for system wake up. You can even disable the power LED.

Oki's zNED is designed to be part of the Oki ZDK. It is offered standalone to allow you to add as many nodes to their development network as they determine is required to properly evaluate ZigBee for your application.