IEEE802.15.4/ZigBee Frame Capture

Question

Hi;

I see Wireshark provides a plug in for capturing IEEE802.15.4/ZigBee packets. But it is designed to work with the Freescale 1322XUSB dongle only. This dongle appears to not be readily available. I believe it should be possible to use the DIGI xstick USB or DIGI XBIB USB development board to do the capture.

Wireshark documentation states it is easy to accomodate other ZigBee USB devices but does not offer any details.

Can we start a discussion on capturing and displaying IEEE802.15.4/ZigBee packets using a DIGI xstick or XBIB and wireshark?

Answer 1

The XStick/XBIB could only work with a custom firmware since inherently it never exposes the actual RF packets (like all the end-devcie beacons, requests to join and so on).

One would actually think such an image would be easy to make - just accept ALL of the bytes exiting the 'MAC' layer and dump them out via serial at 115kbps.

Now this MIGHT be limited in that you'd only see data for 1 PAN at a time. I don't think that would be a horrible limitation.