Originally developed by the American Heating Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, BACnet (short for Building Automation and Control Network) is a communications protocol primarily used in building automation systems to control the data exchange between different devices and components. If you're reading this, you’re likely familiar with the building automation and control industry and might have a BACnet controller being used in your industrial process.
The TOP Server BACnet Driver provides a communication interface to BACnet devices or gateways supporting the BACnet over Ethernet protocol, which is often referred to as "BACnet" or "Annex J". Our BACnet driver also boasts deep functionality advantages including things like:
- Automatic Tag Generation
- Communication with foreign BACnet devices through BACnet/IP Broadcast Management Device (BBMD) routing (enables communication with BACnet MS/TP Serial devices)
- Automatic Device Discovery
- Command Priority, which prioritizes write requests
- User configurable BACnet APDU (Application Protocol Data Unit) settings, which affect message segmentation
- Confirmed and Unconfirmed Event Notifications for both intrinsic and algorithmic notifications for several Event States
- Support for standard Object Types
In this video blog, we'll show you how to get started using our BACnet driver to connect and gather process data from a BACnet device for HMI, SCADA, MES, and other client applications.
Just to summarize, in this video, we've shown you:
- TOP Server best practices when working with BACnet.
- How to configure a TOP Server channel using the BACnet driver, including Foreign Device settings for use with a BBMD (BACnet Broadcast Management Device).
- How to configure a TOP Server BACnet device, including Message Segmentation, Change of Value (COV) Notifications, and Device Discovery settings.
- How to configure tags for a TOP Server BACnet device.
We hope this has provided you with a basic understanding of the BACnet protocol and how to use the TOP Server BACnet driver. Check out our TOP Server Learning Resources for more information and tutorial videos to help you get started collecting data from your devices.
As always, please contact our support team with any questions and don't forget to subscribe to our blog to find out about the latest updates to TOP Server.
Ready to try the TOP Server BACnet driver for yourself? Download the fully-functional free trial.
