Digi manufactures a wide range of Xbee modules with many features.
Digi provides a user interface for simplified setup of the devices.
Is there a question here that I'm missing?
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Yes, has anyone considered writing drivers for the DIGI devices?
XBee isn't what you think it is. It's super locked down. It's nothing like ESP32, if you're thinking it is. It'd be possible to do more with them but the firmware/toolchain is extremely crippled, so much so that anything other than serial-over-ZigBee is pretty much impossible.
There's no "driver" to write for it, since it's basically nothing more than a serial connection but over ZigBee. You connect some other microcontroller to the XBee and it just acts like a serial-over-ZigBee converter.
On the Hubitat side of things there's not "drivers" for them since every use case will be entirely different. What you're asking for is basically "has anyone wrote a driver to connect a raspberry pi to Hubitat?" Since there's a near infinite number of things that could be sent over ZigBee from an XBee to Hubitat there's no way to write a driver for them.
I've got one sitting in a bin collecting dust. I got it, played around with it, found out how locked down they are, and never found a use for it. If I'm going to take some other microcontroller and connect an XBee to it and then use that for something it just doesn't make sense when I could just use a single ESP32 to do the same thing with less complication and at 10% the price.
Everything you said about XBee is true. I used them a lot to automate my house before the onslaught of true Zigbee devices. Serial over an XBee path can work very well and there is no limit on what can be communicated except the imagination of the person working with them. It's like a piece of wire, you can send anything over it.
The huge advantage they bring over wifi is the distance possible using routers to move things along. We get that from Zigbee and it works reliably after being set up. Xbees have been used to track equipment over large projects by having some routers in the yard and high power devices in the equipment. They work very well in those circumstances.
They're like a wire that can move around and carry data for telemetering. They can't carry video, or audio they weren't designed for that. They can certainly tell you the status of a pump a half-mile away supplying water to irrigate a field.
For a light in your living room, a six dollar zigbee device works more cheaply and just as well; it is a good choice. But you may need to look further for a solution in some industries.
You're dead on about creating a driver. There's no point since an XBee is totally in the control of the device hooked to it, and it wouldn't make sense in a general driver case. A specific case would be fine, and a driver could be made for that if you wanted to hook it into a home automation system. But, there's always mqtt as a way of interfacing devices though, so why bother?
I have several XBees that do jobs there is no zigbee device to do (yet), all interfaced through a raspberry pi that takes the json message from the XBee connected device and forwards it to an mqtt topic that can be read by any of the home control systems that support mqtt.
But now, the battery on the tractor I left in the field last night is getting too low, so I need to grab a jump pack and go get it started so I can finish that field today. I want to turn the pump on at sundown to limit evaporation.
They are useful as powerful Zigbee repeaters, I have several in my mesh just to route signal. They can use the "Device" driver built in Hubitat. You have to setup some parameters using XCTU to get them to join. If you look at the everything Xbee thread people have use them as presence sensors in their cars, by loading some code on the Xbee.
They are also great at mapping your complete Zigbee mesh.
See the link below:
Wow!
Thank you for the replies.
All are very informative.
I did purchase 2 development kits from Mouser and pretty much all I got from them, is that basically are mainly to replace a serial cable.
Best regards
Jaime
