6.5 Touchlink Commissioning

The Zigbee protocol provides special commissioning called Touchlink, which is an easy-to-use proximity mechanism for commissioning a device to a network. The Touchlink commissioning cluster provides commands to support Touchlink commissioning. The Touchlink commissioning command set has command identifiers in the range 0x00-0x3f and is transmitted using the inter-PAN transmission service. This process works by the Touchlink initiator determining the proximity of the target device (to be commissioned) and negotiating/transferring network parameters. The Touchlink commissioning process can be used to form a new network or to join a node to an existing network. Touchlink is initiated on a node called the initiator. The ZCL provides the Touchlink as a cluster. The initiator must support the Touchlink cluster as a client, and the target node must support the cluster as a server. If it is required on a node, enable Touchlink commissioning via the Zigbee base device attribute bdbCommissioningMode. For more details on Touchlink commissioning, refer to the ZigBee Alliance Cluster Library Specification Revision 8 (075123).

For example, a ColorSceneController, which is an end device type, brings the light into the network by requesting the light to form the distributed network via Touchlink. To enable Touchlink commissioning, bring a color scene controller close to a target (light) device around like 20-30 cms range.
Figure 6-43. Touchlink Commissioning