What is 'proprietary ZigBee'?

Question

I recently purchased an assortment of sensors from a company and have been having little success in getting them to communicate with my software. I sent a note to the manufacturer asking about compatibility and was told that the devices use 'proprietary ZigBee'.

What does this mean? Do they use a different command set? Is the information is encrypted somehow?

Answer 1

If they are "ZigBee certified" or have a ZigBee logo on the packaging, then they have to implement the standard ZigBee protocols, including ZCL (ZigBee Cluster Library) and ZDO/ZDP (ZigBee Device Object/Profile) on endpoint 0.

Their product could include Manufacturer-Specific clusters with undocumented commands.

If they're using ZCL, then standard ZDO discovery should still work and allow you to enumerate all endpoints and their clusters that don't have the manufacturer-specific bit set. If you know the 16-bit manufacturer ID they're using, you can discover those attributes as well, and display their values (you won't know what they are though).

You should consider reading the ZCL specification at zigbee.org, as it may help you to understand how ZigBee devices communicate with each other. It also explains the manufacturer-specific extensions to the standard.

Answer 2

If you are a developer or are just curious to see the ZigBee traffic among the devices and sensors you have, you might want to try sniffing the traffic.

We use the Perytons sniffer. They support many off-the-shelf dongles you can use as front-ends and provide a 30 days free evaluation of their application.

Answer 3

Proprietary Zigbee usually called as Manufacturer Specific Profile(MSP) in zigbee and is very commonly used by developers and companies. Also Zigbee used to certify MSP till some time last year and used to issue the certificate too of the same. But now the certification is only limited to compliance of zigbee but not the logo usage.

https://www.udemy.com/internet-of-things-and-everything-a-workshop-on-zigbee/