Jennic has announced the commercial launch of a large ZigBee network evaluation product, said to be the first of its kind. This product allows customers to rapidly evaluate and deploy wireless sensor networks of 100 nodes or more in real-world industrial, office and home environments. By combining wireless sensor nodes, software and network monitoring tools, the evaluation product is ready to use out-of-the-box.

The wireless sensor nodes provide a building monitoring application with the provision of temperature, humidity and light sensors, coupled with switches and lights. The nodes can be used as end-points, routers, coordinators and gateways with a mix of standard and high-power modules that can be either mains AC or battery powered. Each node also provides a RS232 serial port for configuration and monitoring. The nodes are preconfigured with a building monitoring application that runs on Jennic's standard ZigBee network stack. Nodes can be modified with its Integrated Developer Environment, allowing users to migrate to their own application.

Following on from a phase of evaluation and prototyping ZigBee networks, the worldwide market is moving towards many companies undertaking trial networks in a variety of environments. The ability to deploy systems with 100 or more nodes using Jennic's wireless MCUs with a standard product enables development effort to be focused on the customer applications rather than the underlying wireless technology.