I bought an Atmel Raven development kit so that I can work with Zigbee.

The LR44 batteries that came with the board lasted 48hrs. So I needed a permanent power solution. The simplest way to power a Raven board is via a USB cable. Cut the end off from it to get at the wires inside. Solder red(+5)/black(GND) to the PCB. Note that you hook power up on pins 1/2 of J401 - not where the power jumper is located. +5 on pin 1, GND on pin 2. Use a powered hub as a power supply and you can move the boards away from your PC.

The demo firmware that comes with the boards, is for.. demos. I quickly figured out that I needed to write new firmware. Of course I don't have any way to load this new firmware into the device. I have to get a JTAG that works with Atmel products like the AVR JTAGICE mkII. Lucky for me Arrow is running a half price sale on the JTAG unit. $150 plus $8 shipping is cheaper than you can buy a clone unit from China.

Now I need to start learning about 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN, Zigbee profiles, etc...

Siemens has started an open source Zigbee implementation for Linux. But as soon as I started looking at it I discovered that the license from the Zigbee alliance for using the Zigbee spec is incompatible with the GPL. A request has been made to the Zigbee alliance to fix their license so that it is GPL compatible. We don't have an answer back from them yet.

We are primarily focused on using Insteon in our product, but we are hedging out bets. There is another set of licensing complications around Insteon that we haven't resolved with Smart Labs.

I looked a little at Z-wave. Like Insteon, Z-wave is controlled by a single vendor, Zensys. I haven't explored the licensing world of Z-wave yet.