Control Network Newsletter

A New and Improved BACnet Discovery Tool

August 2015 - The BACnet Discovery Tool (BDT) has proven itself time and time again to be among the most useful resources available for BACnet users. Now, Contemporary Controls is happy to announce the release of BDT 2.6.

For those unclear as to what the helpful tool is, BDT is a free BACnet/IP application for Windows® that is easy to install and use. It is an excellent means for discovering and verifying communication with MS/TP devices that are being accessed through BACnet/IP routers such the BASrouter or the BASrouterLX. At Contemporary Controls, we use BDT with equipment from different BACnet vendors to prove our routers operate with different equipment configurations.

According to Bennet Levine, R&D Manager at Contemporary Controls, BDT is a vendor-neutral tool that was created to help the company's technical support staff determine if a BACnet router is successfully communicating to attached devices.

"Sometimes customers would indicate an issue with our BASrouter when in fact there was an issue with the configuration of their BACnet client or head-end device or software," Levine said. "By using BDT we could demonstrate to customers that the BASrouter was indeed working by having BDT perform a BACnet discovery of devices on the network."

Taking customer feedback into account, Contemporary Controls has enhanced BDT with a variety of new capabilities. One issue that customers had previously indicated was that their networks were using non-standard BACnet port numbers. While port 47808 will be selected by default, BDT 2.6 now enables users to name the port number to be used. Another feature requested by customers that is now available with BDT 2.6 is the capability to scan for single devices and specific points from said devices. To do this, users must select the check mark on each point to be scanned and each device to be scanned before pressing the "Scan button". Users are also able to control the scan rate in the "Scan Time" box.

Other capabilities of the latest version of BDT include allowing users to choose which network to use with BDT, the ability to dictate if you would like to discover one or multiple devices as well as the retained means to read/write the present-value of the discovered BACnet objects.

As always, BDT remains a free resource for the community.

To learn more about BDT or to download BDT 2.6, go to http://www.ccontrols.com/sd/bdt.htm.