A Low-power Electronic Shelf Label System Based On ZigBee

Paper price labels on the merchandise sales are quite widespread used. There is widevariety of goods in some large supermarkets and the information of goods is frequentlyupdated. The paper labels management, updating and maintenance rely on manual operationsfor a long time. It is inefficient. With the expansion of supermarket scale, the increase in thetypes of goods, the management of disorder, confusion and other conflicts are alsoincreasingly apparent. As the lack of supervision or the operator negligence, it is proneto commodity price error. It will affect the daily sales activities and even damage the image ofthe company.For supermarket price labels maintenance work involving characteristics of high demand,like large amount of information, real-time and high reliability requirements and taking intoaccount the daily operation of supermarkets, system deployment costs and other factors, thispaper aimed at to design and develop a wireless electronic price tag system with real-timeupdate and low-cost features to replace traditional paper-based price tag system. ZigBeetechnology is a short-range communication technology. Its low cost, low power consumptionand high reliability features can satisfy the electronic shelf label system’stechnical requirements.The paper firstly analyzes the functional requirements according to the operationalcharacteristics of the supermarket system. Then in-depth discuss the principles and features ofZigBee technology based on comparison of various short distance wireless communicationstechnology. Design a wireless electronic sign board system based on BitCloud, which is aZigBee stack. After the comparison of some parameters, the papes uses AT91SAM3S4C asthe controller of coordinator and router, ATmega128rfa1as the controller of terminal node,OED electronic paper as the display model, and topologies in a multiple routing meshnetwork. The stack of BitCloud is analyzed in detail. The overall systemarchitecture, hardware design and software design are given in this paper. The parametersincluding the link quality indication, communication distance and received singal strengthindication are tested and verified. The system power consumption is analyzed from thehardware and software aspects. Results show that the update cycle and the ratio of leisure time to sleep time are closely related to the power consumption. Reducing the communicationtraffic, selecting the lower working frequency and voltage can also reduce the powerconsumption of the system.