BACnet has huge presence at ASHRAE

BACnet is making a real effort to become the communications protocol for HVAC/ Security/ BMS systems management for commercial applications, and they announced at the trade show that they will be supporting the Zigbee wireless protocol as well.

With Honeywell, Johnson controls, Siemens and several other large controls companies in compliance with BACnet’s standards, hopefully the dream of true interoperability can be realized, but there are a few hurdles that still need to be jumped before anyone can claim that it will be easy to implement.

BACnet is recommending that manufacturers use ip routing for their packets, while some manufacturers are still sticking with older networking protocols citing things like security and legacy as reason why they haven’t switched.

Second, controls specifiers and designers still struggle with issues of cabling, Some have gone with the RJ45 for ethernet cabling, while other systems are still using older connectors like RS232 connectors(my latest Dell laptop doesn’t even have an RS232 connector)

Hopefully, their entry into the Zigbee Alliance will help them modernize these systems and truly bring this technology into the modern era. If they can’t do it, someone will.