The ZigBee Alliance and the EnOcean Alliance announced Dec. 16 that they'll combine the benefits of EnOcean's energy-harvesting, wireless solutions with ZigBee 3.0. The ZigBee organization also reported that it's ratified ZigBee 3.0, which builds on and unifies ZigBee standards for wireless communications and components.
The cooperation enables the two alliances to create an open, global specification that will extend energy harvesting wireless communication to more self-powered IoT sensors, making battery-less, connected devices a reality.
A technical task force will be created built from the two alliances' representatives to define the technical specifications required to combine standardized EnOcean equipment profiles (EEPs) with ZigBee 3.0, which operates in the worldwide IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz standard. They plan to complete definition of this technical specification and share details of associated collaborative marketing and business activities in the second quarter of 2016.
