Control Network Newsletter
Frankfurt Building Automation Conference Follow-Up
As we mentioned last month as an upcoming event, Contemporary Controls exhibited several products and solutions at the Building Automation Conference September 26th and 27th at Frankfurt Airport, Germany. Our booth is shown to the left. Of major interest was our stand-alone elevator to BACnet interface, which allows head-end access to elevator or escalator status information for a BACnet building network.
Michal Papierz, EMEA Operations Manager (Sales & Marketing), made a well-attended presentation titled "Easy Connection to the Cloud While Protecting IoT-enabled BACnet Controllers". The presentation highlighted the benefits, features, and security requirements needed when connecting to a cloud platform. A wealth of information was presented and was well received.
Christian Blenz, Application Engineer, presented a 5-minute "elevator pitch" describing our approach to adding BACnet to elevators and escalators. This drew even more attendees to visit our booth.
Also featured at the show was our BASpi family of Edge Controllers, including our BASpi-BCC, which can function as a BACnet to IoT Gateway. The BASpi-BCC supports the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol, one of the most commonly used in IoT applications. MQTT clients are very simple to implement, which makes this protocol easy to adopt for a wide variety of IoT devices, platforms, and operating systems. It offers a lightweight and reliable solution for transmitting data in an otherwise unreliable environment. MQTT is not secure by default, but there are different security mechanisms supported in the TCP/IP stack that can be utilized to protect data when using MQTT in IoT applications. By coupling other members of the BASpi family (which offer I/O) to the BASpi-BCC, it is possible to provide a BACnet to cloud solution for local BACnet devices which cannot connect to the cloud on their own.
Visit the BASpi product page to learn more.