Silicon Labs created cost-effective reference designs to significantly reduce the complexity of connecting ZigBee devices, such as lights, dimmer switches and door/window contact sensors, in a connected home network. This design simplicity translates into exceptional ease of use for consumers who are increasingly purchasing “do-it-yourself” connected home products at leading home improvement retailers such as Home Depot and Lowes.

Silicon Labs’ ZigBee connected lighting reference designs feature wireless lighting boards as well as a plug-in demo board suitable for quick demonstrations and testing. The Golden Unit ZigBee stack allows LED lights to reliably join, interoperate and leave a mesh network, as well as scale from a few to hundreds of light nodes on the same network. The connected lights can support white, color temperature tuning and RGB color settings as well as dimming.

Silicon Labs’ ZigBee-based home automation reference designs include a capacitive-sense dimmable light switch and a small-form-factor door/window contact sensor. The light switch provides color, color tuning and dimming control capabilities that traditional switches cannot achieve. Unlike conventional switches, these wireless, battery-powered switches have no moving parts and are easy to place anywhere in a home.

The switch design features Silicon Labs’ EFM8 capacitive sensing MCU to detect different user gestures (touch, hold and swipe). The contact sensor reference design provides all the tools needed to create wireless, battery-powered sensors used to monitor door and window positions (open or closed) – a useful feature for automatically triggering room lighting.

Features:

－ Silicon Labs’ EM358x mesh networking SoCs, combining an ARM Cortex-M3 processor core with a low-power 2.4 GHz 802.15.4 transceiver

－ Low-power designs enabling very long battery life: up to three years for dimmable light switches and up to five years for contact sensors on a CR2032 coin-cell battery

－ Silicon Labs’ Golden Unit ZigBee PRO-certified software stack and ZigBee HA 1.2-certified applications, enabling interoperability with other HA 1.2-certified devices

－ Over-the-air ZigBee updates and future-proof upgrades to Silicon Labs’ Thread software

－ Mesh networking capability scaling from tens to hundreds of nodes with individual selectivity, without costly rewiring of existing systems

－ Best-in-class wireless development kit with configuration and debugging tools to simplify design, as well as packet trace port on EM358x SoCs for network signal debugging

－ FCC/CE pre-certified hardware for easy system configuration and fast time to market

－ Complete schematics, layout and bill of materials (BOM)