The Hardware Contents

One of the hot new chips for Zigbee has got to be the TI CC2530 and family. This is a single chip 8051 core that has plenty of RAM/Flash and a ‘free open-source Zigbee-certified’ stack.

In order to play with this a bit I bought the CC2530 RemoTI development kit. The kit costs $150 at any of the usual distributors. It comes with an amazing set of stuff and seemed like a deal when I bought it. Furthermore I have this incredible need for a programmable RF remote so it fits my house perfectly (maybe).

This will be a few posts since there’s so much to cover. First, the hardware.

The Remote Control

Included is an almost standard Universal Electronics (brand name) remote control. It’s a nice enough back-lit remote (although the backlight is kind of on the right) with an RF portion rather than an infrared LED. There’s a hole in the front of the remote where there used to be an LED.

The USB Stick

This is a pretty neat looking USB stick with a CC2531 F256 on it. It has a JTAG port but no SIP port. It uses a folded F antenna. The TI came with a sheet of paper noting that although the USB stick passed FCC and ETSI, the VCO leakage at 4.8GHz was marginal. They expect a new rev reducing the leakage. The stick has two user switches and two leds on it.

The Target Board

The target board is a typical TI target board with a CC2530 F256 daughterboard and a real antenna and gold-plated connectors. Here are a couple of shots. It’s a bunch smaller than it looks. The target board has USB input, an IR detector, an IR emitter some switches and some leds.

This is the target with the daughter mounted.

Here’s the target with no daughter board.

Here’s the bottom of the target, showing the ti usb chip interface.

Here’s a closeup of the daughterboard without the antenna.

The Debugger

The last piece of this extensive kit is the CC debugger. A simple jtag debugger/programmer that’s included.