alan smith wrote:

> The nice thing about the Xbee is that its all built into the module.....just interface with  3.3V TTL (NOT 5V for the Xbee products) straight from the micro UART and your done.

Thanks for the summary - sounds like you've been using them.

I think this is the gist of it: the XBee is all-in-one, and it's small 
and reasonably cheap ($19).  You could make the same thing with 
Microchip's free ZigBee stack, a PIC18F, and one of the third-party 
radios like Chipcon's, and you'd get increased flexibility (e.g., 
updating the firmware, more control over antenna type & placement), but 
at the cost of time and attention paid to the low-level details.

This seems to be the way the market's segmented at the moment: 
all-in-ones vs. micro + radio + balun etc.
-- 
Timothy J. Weber
http://timothyweber.org
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