4th European ZigBee Developers’ Conference

On April 27-28, 2010, 237 attendees, speakers and exhibitors met in Munich, Germany to discuss the latest trends around designing wireless ZigBee networks.

As the ZigBee standard has grown mature, there is no longer a need for extensive talks about basic things like PHY or stacks during the fourth European Developers Conference – this was the mutual consent among the 237 attendees, speakers and exhibitors. Consequently the conference was rather focusing on topics like how to transform the technology into use cases, how to set up application profiles quickly leveraging the ZigBee Cluster Library, the certification of products according to the ZigBee Smart Energy Standard or how to supply ZigBee nodes utilizing energy harvesting methods.

The second day was all about ZigBee in real life applications. Examples span a broad range from mobile identification of patients in a hospital combined with localization, intelligent shopping carts also including localization, data logging and labeling in the cooling chain of a warehouse to control and data logging in a street lighting setup, control of lighting, air conditioning and other appliances in buildings and finally the already well established task of Smart Metering or communication links within Smart Energy concepts. Some speakers also dared to take a glimpse into the future and discussed the use of ZigBee for instance in automotive applications.

Four well visited workshops provided the possibility for attendees to see hard- and software of some vendors live in action, some even offered hands-on experience. Next to the presentations and workshops, ten exhibitors showed their products and solutions around ZigBee. Here the exhibits ranged all the way from single receiver chips and certified ZigBee modules to applications like battery powered switches to activate loads wirelessly. Especially during the conference breaks the exhibitors had in-depth talks about the various project ideas the attendees brought with them to Munich. Again the conference proved its claim to be an international event: The attendees came from 20 countries, one of them even traveled all the way from Australia.

Some feedback on the conference:

Exhibitor:
"Thank for the wonderful organization of the 4th European ZigBee Developers’ Conference. We were very pleased with the participant number and the quality of attendees who were present."

Attendees:
"Thank you for a very good ZigBee meeting. The conference covered very good subjects."
"Congratulations to the whole team for this extremely successful conference. Workshop No. 5 also was a real hit! Super capable engineers at work. The audience was highly motivated and there was no end for many interested questions and lively discussions."

Speaker:
"It was a pleasure to be there, I had some very interesting conversations and follow up e-mails."