Interconnecting zigbee and bluetooth networks with BLupZi

Abstract

The Zigbee low-power communication standard has established itself as one of the most important wireless standards, enabling thousands of industrial and environmental monitoring applications. At the same time, Bluetooth and newly also Bluetooth Low Energy has captured the gadget and smartphone markets and currently enables various health and personal applications. The border between these two markets becomes thinner and applications would profit significantly from interconnecting these two standards and sharing the information obtained. We will demonstrate our custom designed device BLupZi, which interconnects the worlds of Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee. It can be configured to stream all data from one of the networks to the other or to filter particular packet types or source IDs. We will present two examples with two different types of Zigbee sensor nodes and a smartphone.