If you are still concerning about the high price of wireless solutions for industrial control system, you must learn about the new product launched in June 2009 by ICP DAS: The Serial-to-ZigBee converters ZB-2550 and ZB-2551!

ZigBee is a specification based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for wireless personal area networks (WPANs). It can reach a maximum baud rate of 115,200 bps, which is sufficient for industrial control. Other than lower cost, ZigBee also features stability, safety, flexibility, mesh nodes and convenience comparing with other wireless communication specifications.

ZB-2550 is the host device and ZB-2551 is the slave device. Since ZigBee uses a basic master-slave configuration, users can easily build Star, Mesh and Cluster Tree topologies by combining with ZB-2510, the ZigBee repeater. And users can also freely add or remove ZB-2551 modules in the network and build any kind of topologies which they need.

When ZigBee signal is interrupted, adding ZB-2510 repeaters into the network will strengthen the signal and help it get through the interruption. Besides, if the signal is obstructed, users can also build a bypath with ZB-2510 repeaters to skip the obstruction. And it is possible to build redundant paths with ZB-2510 repeaters, in order to keep the network working when one of the paths breaks down.