The S4 Group, Inc.

Who says that you can’t teach and old dog new tricks!?

We just completed testing an enhancement today that makes a Metasys supervisory controller (NCM, N30, Companion, Facilitator, NAE, or Facility Explorer) cooperate as a peer in a BACnet building automation network. Our original implementation of the S4 Open: BACnet-N2 Router gave the supervisory controller a slice of time on the N2 bus and allowed it to do whatever it wanted. That worked very well for smaller integration projects where the goal was short term co-existence with a new BACnet BAS. However, for larger projects, or those requiring a protracted transition period, there clearly was a need to make the Metasys supervisory controller adhere to the BACnet priority array structure. See the related article for details about the available features and options.

This was a major development and testing effort that was driven by an integration partner utilizing 19 BACnet-N2 Routers in a high rise Federal building. In addition, the complexity level of the facility was very high due to a smoke control environment. When the project is completed we hope to work with our integration partner to provide a case study.