ZigBee In Boating

Although we are seeing more and more Bluetooth enabled devices appearing in the marine electronics environment, I stll very strongly believe that ZigBee has many advantages over Bluetooth in a typical boating context. I can’t imagine that it will take very long for a smart marine electronics manufacturer to incorporate this technology in a new range of products. Here’s a nice update on the state of ZigBee.
“Given enough devices spread around a house, this multi-hop �mesh networking� approach can use redundant pathways to make sure the message gets through even if one of the devices is out of order. For example, if you were sitting in bed and flipped a portable switch to preheat the hot tub in the back yard, the message might normally pass through a node in the kitchen. However, if your kitchen ZigBee�s battery died, the message could still get through in a wireless version of an end-around play. By simultaneously transmitting the message to the den, your tub switch could bypass the kitchen transmitter, still getting the �on� message to the tub. But because another major ZigBee innovation is power efficiency, the kitchen battery is not likely to go dead in the first place. By instructing nodes to wake up only for those split second intervals when they�re needed, ZigBee is so chintzy with electricity that batteries might last for years.”