The mPCIe Zigbee card is based on the Telegesis ETRX357HR-LRS module, which is essentially a non-transparent narrow band RF transmitter capable of long range (150m) comms. In this example we will walk through an example of how to make a basic connection with the Zigbee card.

In addition to the mPCIe Zigbee ard you will need an aerial pigtail cable connected up the RF output connector You can read about the capabilities of the Telegesis ETRX357 module here :

Silicon Labs ETRX357HR-LRS Product Page

The Zigbee module is connected to the Raspberry Pi system via a FTDI USB UART device, in order to make the ttyUSBx serial port for the card constantly easy to identify we use a udev rule to help us, this is called 10-ftdi-usbserial.rules and is located /etc/udev/rules.d/

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb",ATTRS{busnum}=="1",ATTRS{product}=="FT230X Basic UART",ATTRS{idProduct}=="6015",ATTRS{manufacturer}=="FTDI",SYMLINK+="ttyS1"

This one line creates a symlink for the mpcie FTDI USB serial port called /dev/ttyS1

In addition to this the /dev/mpcie1-reset system shortcut (GPIO41) is connected to the module's /RESET line to allow a hard reset of the module if it becomes unresponsive.

We'll use minicom to make a basic connection using the below command line :

minicom -D /dev/ttyS1 -b19200

Once started we'll need to disable hardware flow control using the key sequence CTRL-a and then press o then use the menu to change hardware flow control to No. finally type ati and press return, this will report the unit's Device name, Firmware revision and IEEE 802.15.4 identifier

For more information please refer to the AT command set below :

ETRX3xx AT Command Set