As and when I get satisfied with work of Energy meter which is still not complete, I Moved on to prototype development of wireless Transceiver which can be used for the transfer of data to the central coordinator node which should be having Internet connectivity and data of energy meter can be avail to the cloud of Internet and to the needed user.
For the transfer of data, wireless technology chosen is Zigbee standard.
Zigbee standard is specifically design for short range,low power data transfer and it can achieve some what long range through multi hoping technique which may be known to you.Zigbee standard is at good stable stage and aslready labched two stable standards for developing stack which Zigbee stack2003 and Zigbee Pro which is launched in 2007 if not wrong.Then after it has also launched many application profiles standards like home automation, Automatic meter reading and few more to hold a compatibility between different manufactures working zigbee technology.
There are many more hardware chipsets availble for the zigbee standard from different manufactures like Atmel, TI, Freescale, Ember, Jennic etc.Many of them have also launched this Zigbee hardware chipset with in built microcontroller like 8051,MSP430 and from freescale 16 bit .
Among this all atmel do not have on chip microcontroller and RF platform for zigbee yet but As informed by them they planning to launch it by end of 2008 but still not available so we can hardly expect it by MID of 2009.
Out of this all (MCU+Zigbee transceiver) combination with 128kb flash from Atmel cost lowest around 8$ as on DIGIKEY.And more than that I have choosen this due to availbility of good resources for the development based on it.SO finnally I have chosen ATMEGA1281+AT86RF230 combination with hope that Atmel will launch both items on chip by Mid 2009 which will further reduce price of this.
Now to run zigbee network we need stack for the embedded firmware which may be designed by some third party because it is a long time job to developed it at our own.Atmel provide ZIgbee stack to the user with online agreement.they have released two stack namely "Ezeenet" and "Bitcloud stack".Bit cloud stack is based on Zigbee pro stack standard launched in 2007.Whereas if I am not wrong then ezeenet stack is based on 2003 standards of Zigbee.There is also something called Zigbee Net from Meshnetics which is being needed to load into the Zigbit chipset from meshnetics which is a basically combination of ATmeaga1281+At86RF230
So this was enough to chose Zigbee technology chipset from Atmel as well as MCU.
