Lab testing of the latest version of the BACnet-N2 Router is complete and the release was sent to the formal field test site last week and is available now for early adopter installations. In many cases, the enhancements included in this release were developed for specific projects; the earliest of these enhancements were implemented well over a year ago and, therefore, have had substantial production environment deployments.
This package of enhancements was not only important to the projects where we developed and tested them as “special features,” they were critical pre-requisites to supporting three new integrations that we have prototyped over the last 1 ½ years. Patience is a virtue, but, believe me when I tell you that it has been very hard for all of us at The S4 Group and Obermeier Software to put these integrations on the shelf while we waited for this enhancement package to be completed. Look for us in the EnOcean® Alliance booth at the NFM&T show in Baltimore on March 12th through 14th where we will be talking about our S4 Open: BACnet-EnOcean® Router and our EnOcean® Hotspot. Over the next three months, I’ll be going into details about this and the three other integrations that are in the works.
The following is a brief rundown of the many enhancements included in the latest version of the S4 Open: BACnet-N2 Router, for more detail please read the full article.
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Support for BACnet COV – this includes support for COV subscriptions as well as Unconfirmed COV notifications.
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Each N2 device is now published as its own BACnet virtual device in a BACnet virtual network.
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BACnet priority array support is emulated for all point types where this is defined in the BACnet standard, as well as a mechanism within our N2 Device Type Templates as implementing .Value, .Override, or .Release N2 commands to accommodate Metasys® Override and Release capabilities.
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“Supervisory Controller as a BACnet Client” feature allows you to transition from a legacy Metasys® supervisory controller one point at a time simply by commanding the point at a higher BACnet priority level than that which you have assigned to the Supervisory controller.
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Point instance numbers are now assigned in our Device Type Template so, once assigned, an instance number will never change unless you modify the template.
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A number of significant enhancements were made to our support for the DX-9100. We developed a software overlay for the DX-9100 with functionality that provides Override and Release capability in a manner similar to that of the N2 Open devices. Additionally, the BACnet-N2 Router now publishes System-91 data objects as the correct BACnet data object for physical I/O. Previously, all System-91 points were published as AV or BV data types.
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In N2 Open devices, N2 BD points can represent either small unsigned integers or Boolean values, at the discretion of the Metasys® firmware developer. Our Device Type Templates have been revised to reflect the correct usage of each BD point and publish those points as either AV or BV, as appropriate.
Download the full PDF article here.