[request] Zigbee Support

[dansiviter]

Summary

As per title, support Zigbee.

[dansiviter]

I've had a go including the 'zigbee' files from the SDK, but there are so many and it's difficult to understand what's actually required. Any guidance would be appricated.

[def1149]

Please add Zigbee support

[code-schneiderei]

Please add Zigbee support

[silabs-bozont]

Thank you for the request! We already have Zigbee support in the works - you can expect it in one of the upcoming releases!

[silabs-bozont]

Hey Dan Siviter (@dansiviter) def1149 Code-Schneiderei (@code-schneiderei)
Would any of you folks be interested in taking the Zigbee support for a test drive?
You can find the development version in my fork: https://github.com/silabs-bozont/arduino/tree/zigbee
To test it you'd need to clone my fork, run cd package && ./bootstrap.sh and replace your existing core installation with the contents.
We'd really appreciate any feedback on it you might have. Thank you a ton in advance if you give it a go.

[def1149]

Tamas Jozsi (@silabs-bozont)

I'll take look and give it try if I have a supported dev board

I'm not familiar with the various MG24 sleep modes' power consumption.
In the zigbee_end_device.ino example, what's the approximate chip power consumption when using LowPower.sleep(10000) on a Seeed Studio XIAO MG24?
In the loop(), what's the approximate active time between sleeps? In other words, how long on average, assuming no retirements, etc., does it take to wake up, deliver Zigbee data, and go back to sleep?

[silabs-bozont]

Hello def1149,
Thank you very much for checking it out! The end device example is taking around 200ms to send the data, but I could optimize it to be around 100ms by tweaking the delay(100) to be less in the loop while we wait for the message to be sent.

I took a similar chip as the one on the XIAO MG24 and measured its power consumption with a WSTK kit - it idles around 5mA - which is a bit too much. LowPower.sleep yields the execution for the given amount of time, so that the MCU can go into the EM2 state at best - but other factors can keep it from sleeping as well. I might have to look into what is keeping the MCU from going lower.

We plan on implementing Sleepy End Devices as well in the future. Also, using LowPower.deepSleep will result in much lower consumption as it makes the device to go as low as EM4 - practically turning it off.

Be careful with it though, it also turns off the programming interface, so there's a possibility for bricking if you're not careful. You can read more about it here: https://github.com/SiliconLabsSoftware/arduino/tree/main/libraries/ArduinoLowPower#%EF%B8%8F-flashing-while-in-deep-sleep