CC2530 & CC2531

Playing with hardware while waiting for programmer

I had finished research for ‘what is CC2531’ two days ago. My programmer is still somewhere at outbounds of Chinas, so I can’t do anything useful with it.

But my previous order had contained one more thing: a simple zigbee power switch. If CC2531 has a sniffer firmware right from the factory, and I have a zigbee device, should I be able to see at least something?

Hardware

The device I bought have a rather specific way to connect to wires: using plastic ends (where wire need to be cold pressed into plastic by special tool, leaving a hollow metallic tube with a wire inside for insertion).

Absolutely luckily, I have tools for this job:

Cold press for cold pressed plastic caps plus an insulator crimper, $17 from China.

After three or four attempts I learned how to use them (use a proper diameter inserts into tools, mine caps was 1mm and I tried to press them with 2mm inserts), and was able to complete the schematic.

The zigbee power switch is in the middle of the wire, blinking red/green to say ‘nothing works!’.

By pressing a button on the side of the device I was even able to force it to click a relay, causing indicator on the extension socket to lid up.

While I was struggling to press caps properly I opened the case and found that there is a CC2530 inside!

I think we already had discussed about CC2530, and here it is again.

I thing CC2350 and CC2531 would become a good friends! I still don’t know if this stuff is a zigbee router or just an end device yet.

Sniffing!

As we discussed before, my usb stick is a (passive) sniffer, and there is an opensource project for sniffing with it: https://github.com/mitshell/CC2531.git (It requires some non-pypi dependencies, so I used setup.py twice in one virtualenv to run it).

I run it and got my first zigbee output here:

+] frame received (FCS OK): 2019-09-06 21:21:18
channel: 20, 2450 MHz
RSSI: 30
IEEE 802.15.4 frame: 030826ffffffff07
IEEE 802.15.4 MAC:
[[[ IEEE 802.15.4 ]]]
### [MAC] ###
 <[Res] : 0b0>
 <[IntraPAN] : '0 : False'>
 <[AckReq] : '0 : False'>
 <[FramePending] : '0 : False'>
 <[Security] : '0 : False'>
 <[Type] : '3 : MAC command'>
 <[SrcAddrMode] : '0 : Not present'>
 <[FrameVers] : 0b00>
 <[DstAddrMode] : '2 : 16-bit address'>
 <[Res] : 0b00>
 <[SeqNum] : 38>
 <[DstPANID] : 0xffff>
 <[DstAddr] : 0xffff>
 <[SrcPANID] : 0x>
 <[SrcAddr] : 0x>
 ### [Data] ###
  <[RawData] : 0x07>

Not if this is really interesting, but here it is, a working something!

That’s all I could do here for now without having a proper zigbee controller (that means, I need to flash this usb stick, and this needs a programmer. Hello, china post, is someone out there?..)