Texas Instruments announced that their Zigbee stack will no longer be sold as a separate license and instead is available for free. The networking stack is compliant with Zigbee 2006 (keep in mind that Zigbee 2006 is not inter-operable with Zigbee 2004 or Zigbee Pro). We applaud TI's decision to both release their stack for free without requiring additional licensing, and TI's reduction in cost for their development kits to attract a broader market to wireless sensing.

Although the stack is free, it does have a few restrictions. The TI Zigbee stack must be run on TI hardware. TI has not announced which third-party modules the software supports. Furthermore, a direct download link to the software is not readily available on the TI website.

Expect more companies to provide networking stacks for free as they become more and more commoditized. As we previously mentioned, Sensinode is offering a GPL open source stack for IETF's 6lowpan.

Read the full TI press release >>

If you're able to find the download link for public availability of TI's Zigbee stack, please send it to us at Moteiv.

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