Do you ever think about what’s going on in the bowels of a conversation between your PC’s USB port and the new hi-tech gadget you just plugged in? Have you ever seriously thought about what’s going on in that Ethernet access point that’s enabling you to view the Circuit Cellar web site? When you were using a dial-up Internet connection, did you really give a darn about the datastream being passed between your PC’s serial port and the modem? No! Then why should you be excited about the binary exchange within a ZigBee PAN?

In all of the examples I just mentioned, the ultimate goal is to move the desired data to the next carrier in the communications path until the data is delivered to the targeted endpoint. As a user, all that matters is getting what you typed in or uploaded to its final destination. Once your data payload reaches its intended endpoint, all you care about is getting a response through the same virtual and physical paths you pushed the request through.

To a designer like you, the concepts of USB and Ethernet are easy to grasp because you’ve probably been at the bit level of the USB and Ethernet hotels. However, try explaining USB enumeration to someone who knows little more than how to plug in a USB device. Or, better yet, try telling that same nontechnical end user about all of the wonderful technical stuff going on inside a TCP/IP transaction and how it all relates to the Ethernet cable he just plugged into his DSL box.

In the end, all an end user wants is to access and receive data without having to understand the nuances of every software algorithm and hardware device that the data has to traverse. That’s the idea behind MaxStream’s XBee and XBee-Pro ZigBee modules.