IOT service support for BACnet building automation systems

Question

Are there plans to build a Bluemix service for BACnet devices, if so, when will it be available.

This would be a great service for industrial device automation, to gather information from devices into a corporate Oracle database for analysis.

Thanks

Answer 1

BACnet defines a multitude of transport protocols besides TCP/IP. So you will most likely (since it is a mature protocol) find the bulk of devices communicating via something else than TCP/IP.

The specification mentions a BACnet Broadcast Management Device, which would be most likely the communications endpoint talking to Bluemix.

Using the IoT Foundation Service in Bluemix, you can reach Bluemix trough: TCP, UDP, MQ, MQTT, HTTP - basically anything that sends IP.

Have a look at the Bluemix service NodeRED that gives you head start.

What I would do:

• NodeRed runs on PC or Raspberry PI too - use Thingbox for the PI
• The PI has been shown to run BACNet
• Now the tricky part (we could collaborate on that): build some Nodes for NodeRED to do the BacNET interaction

With this approach you decouple the local BacNET network from the cloud. I would then use MQ(TT) to talk to the cloud, so you don't loose data when there is a connection challenge (e.g. you use 3G).