Episode Description:
In episode 467 of the Smart Buildings Academy Podcast, you’ll dive deep into BACnet Testing Laboratories (BTL) and how understanding BTL listings can significantly impact your work in building automation. Whether you’re a contractor taking over a building or a facility manager looking to specify BACnet systems, this episode offers essential insights into device capabilities, interoperability, and conformance. By the end of the episode, you’ll be equipped to make smarter decisions regarding BACnet device selection and deployment.
Key takeaways you’ll get:
- Understanding BTL Listings: Learn how to interpret protocol implementation conformance sheets and what they reveal about device capabilities.
- Device Profiles and Interoperability: Explore the different BACnet profiles (such as AAC, B-BC) and how they apply to your systems.
- Functional Groups and Building Blocks: A breakdown of BACnet interoperability blocks, like data sharing, alarming, and trending.
- Network Capabilities: Discover how network compatibility impacts system integration and device communication.
- The Role of BACnet Testing Laboratories: Why BTL certification matters and how it ensures system functionality and compliance.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to enhance their knowledge of BACnet standards and BTL listings. Listen now to stay ahead in your building automation projects.
Click here to download or listen to this episode now.
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Free Technical Skill Assessments
- Smart Buildings Academy Workforce Development Program
- Smart Buildings Academy Courses
- Building Automation Training Guides
Podcast Video
Transcript
Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito. Episode 467, Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode 467, of the smart buildings Academy podcast. In this episode, we're going to be talking about BTL back net testing laboratories. We're going to talk about device profiles. We're going to talk about BACnet interoperability building building blocks where talk about just all the different aspects of BTL listings and what makes them up. As always, this podcast can be found at podcast smart buildings, academy.com forward slash 467, once again, that's podcast smart buildings. Academy.com forward slash 467, if you're watching this on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, please go and like, comment, subscribe, share, do all the good social media stuff that helps us share this free podcast with the world. If you're listening to us on a podcast streaming service like Spotify or Apple podcast, please consider giving us a five star review, it really does help. And I do want to say this episode is sponsored by our free technical skill assessment. If you're looking to pinpoint the skill gaps that you or maybe your team have, maybe you're planning for some upcoming training, some upcoming development of your team, and you really want to do that based on quantitative data. I encourage you to join the over 23,000 individuals who have taken our skill assessment by going to smart buildings academy.com forward slash skills. Once again, that is smart buildings. Academy.com forward slash skills. All right, so this came up the other day. We're running workforce development, which is our 11 week online program that's instructor led, that's meant to go and train someone who literally was a postal worker working completely outside the field, doesn't matter what their role was, and bring them up to a startup technician level that can be 80% job, chargeable and on their own in 11 weeks. And we've had a really good track record of that. We are on, I think, our 16th cohort, if you count our private OEM cohorts as well. And one of the students had a different kind of controller than what's in our lab kit, and our instructors were just figuring out, how can we best support them? Because we support a bunch of students from a bunch of different companies, and we had to figure out what capabilities this controller had, because naturally, the students knew they're not exactly sure what the capabilities of this controller are, so we're trying to figure it out. And the first place we go to is BTL listing. BACnet is primarily the the winning protocol nowadays. So pretty much every controller that's in the market has a BTL listing. We can see there's 1400 products here. And so we dove into the device profile. We looked it up, we filtered by manufacturer. We looked it up, we brought up the spreadsheet, and we started going through the protocol implementation conformance sheet. And by the way, I should have said this earlier, if you're listening to this podcast, definitely watch it. Definitely go to pockets of smart buildings, academy.com, forward, slash, 467, or go to YouTube or Facebook or LinkedIn and watch this, because there's going to be a PowerPoint that I'm going to go through a lot of information here. My goal is, by the end of this episode, you will be very familiar with BTL listing. You'll understand exactly what the BACnet testing laboratory does, what BTL listings are, how to read protocol implementation conformance sheets, and how they impact your selection of devices. Okay, so I've put several products through BTL testing in the past. Essentially what you do when you do a BTL test is you go and you fill out a profile, and then you have to demonstrate to BACnet that you actually conform. And you'll get the certificate of conformance that will basically say yes it conforms. And you'll have a protocol implementation conformance sheet or a pix document, and that is going to show all the capabilities of the controller. So we're going to look at a pix real quick. I'm just going to grab the first one. I come along here as an AAC, so actually, I lied. I'm going to grab the second one. Let's just grab this right here. Pix document. I'm going to launch this document. We're going to see what pops up here. Okay, so Annex A protocol implementation conformance sheet, and we're going to see that this is a advanced application control. Controller. We're going to see that it has a series of building blocks. Don't worry if this stuff doesn't make sense to you just yet, it will by the end of this episode. We also see different standard objects that this device supports. And there should be network capabilities down here too. Yep, data, link layers. It supports BACnet IP, annex J, as well as annex J foreign device. And we see that it does not do binding of devices. It is not a BACnet SC device, so it's a non secure device, at least according to this document. So a lot of information here, and you may be looking at this and be completely confused as to what any of this means, my hope is by the end of this presentation, that will no longer be the case. I do want to apologize in advance. It is fall break, my children have been told to be quiet. I have put the bark color on the dog, but it is entirely possible that noise will still happen, and just want to apologize for that in advance. What is BACnet testing laboratories? So BACnet testing laboratories certifies devices for compliance with the BACnet standard, ASHRAE 135, I think. What is it 2019 or is it 2023 right? Now, I don't remember simple Google could tell you that, but that's like a 1800 page standard, last time I read it, that talks through how to implement BACnet. Now, the important point of BTL profiles and BACnet testing laboratory is we ensure that the device meets a profile. This is very important for specifiers when they want to go and actually specify a BACnet system. This is important for contractors when they want to know maybe they're taking over a building. What is that building we're taking over capable of? And this is important for owners who want to know exactly what's in their building and what can it do? We're going to see some primary profiles. There are more profiles than this, but the real big ones that we're going to run into most of the time are the B, O, W, S and AWS. This is BACnet operator workstation. AWS is advanced workstation, BACnet building controller. This is your supervisory device, slash router, your AAC most of our plant controllers and unitary controllers these days are AACS. These are BACnet advanced application controllers. And we're seeing more vav boxes and VMA controllers actually be AACS as well. In the past, most VMA controllers and unitary controllers were ASCs. There's a difference in capabilities. While we're not going to dive into what each profile means and what it is, we are going to cover them at a high level, then we have BACnet SS and SA. We're seeing more of these as we're seeing BACnet devices deployed. These are typically slave devices, not master devices, meaning that they can respond as a server, but they're typically not a client. And we'll go through client versus server in this, because it gets a little confusing. But sensors, right? These are going to be input devices, typically actuators. These are going to be output devices. Typically, we see a lot more of the BACnet SS than we see of the BACnet SA. All right, the components of a BTL profile. You kind of saw this in the document I shared. You're going to see the device type. What is the category of the device like? Is it a BBC? Is it an AAC? What's it role? What are the BACnet interoperability building blocks? Those were those weird things you saw, like RP dash a or RP dash b. We're going to see its conformance class. This is is it advanced? Is it back? Basic? Is it intermediary? I usually, honestly don't look at this. I can simply look at the device type and tell kind of what it does. The purpose of this was meant to make it a little bit easier for specifying. You could look at the basic classes and be like, Oh, this basic, this is going to do my unitary stuff. Advanced is more like my central plants or my servers. More advanced capabilities, functional groups. This is going to be a group of the bibs. So while bibs, the BACnet interoperability building blocks, which will make a lot more sense in just a second. While, there is different types, like RP, dash a, or, what is it? Tr, dash, a I think. And there's a bunch of different capabilities in each BACnet interoperability block they go,
Phil Zito 9:50
that is hard to say fast by the way. They go and group up into these functional groups, then you have optional features. We're not gonna spend a whole ton. Time on that. And then you have network capabilities. This is going to tell you how it can communicate via the network, backnet conformance classes. It's important to know, but I, honestly, I don't really use it much. Class One is basic functionality. This is going to be your essay and SS, intermediary functionality. This is typically going to be your ASCs, advanced functionality. This is typically going to be your AACS or your building controllers, and then we have our class four. Class four is, I don't see it a ton really. Most it is technically the BACnet advanced workstation, but most of the time I see class three and class four get kind of blended. All right, let's go into functional groups. Here we go. Sorry, I copied a slide twice. BACnet interoperability, functional groups so we have data sharing, which is ds, alarming, AE, scheduling, S, C, H, E, D, trending, which is t, I thought it was TR, for some reason, device and network management, which is DM, and Backup and Restore, which is br. If you've studied BACnet services, then you know who is IAM. Those are our discovery services. Those are the ones that use broadcasts. You know, things like data sharing. These are going to be your read write, read write, multiple these are your common, complex and complex acknowledged services that we see for when we want to read a point object or write point object. We've got BACnet alarming, back net scheduling. Some systems use this. Some systems implement their own form of scheduling and alarming. And then we have trending. This is also under the trending typically, where the cov will come into play as well. So this is where it gets a little bit confusing. So on these you would see something like DS dash a, and what that would mean is that the device is capable of doing the role where it initiates the communication or service request. So what does this look like in practice? What would happen is a controller would say, I want to read a property. So it would be a client initiator, and then the other controller would have the server capability, and it would respond to that read property. So it would go and say, the client would say, hey, I want to do read property on this device, on this object ID, and then the server would respond with the present value of that object ID. So a lot of controllers you'll see will have both the A and the B capabilities on the read property, and then you'll see that they lose, potentially, the client initiator capability when we get to like device management and stuff that'll be for the more advanced devices. I'm going to go through these super quick. I'm not going to bore you to tears, but we see right data sharing read property. This becomes pretty obvious once you know what this means. And hopefully this is kind of opening your eyes to these acronyms, right? We see data sharing, read property, read property multiple, write property, write property multiple, we see alarming, right? So this is notification acknowledgeable. This is inform so one is going to allow for an acknowledgement. One is going to just simply do inform, and then we have the acknowledge property, and then we have event enrollment, so you can enroll, and then summaries. There's a lot to this, but like I said, a lot of vendors implement their own alarming scheduling and trending so I'm not going to dive into this too deep scheduling, right? We have our weekly schedule, our calendar holiday schedule, and our binary object schedule. For those of you who use some manufacturers, you'll notice this closely matches their calendar scheduling capabilities. So I would say this is the BACnet outside of data sharing and device management. This is the most commonly followed one. Then we have trending, right? We have view modify trend log. We have initiating and responder. So initiating maybe would be like an operator workstation or advanced workstation that would initiate a trend, and then it would grab that trend log that's on that object, and the device that had that trend log would respond. And then we have automated trend retrieval. You can learn a lot more about this by just reading the BACnet standard about how they actually implement this is an important one, because this is where we have the capability to go and create devices, bind those devices, do time syncs with those devices, re initialize those devices, a case like we lose network connectivity to them. This is something you commonly see in AACS and BCS so advanced application controllers and Bill. Controllers. It used to be that only building controllers, Supervisory devices, slash routers, were the ones that supported DM, but now we're seeing DM being pushed down into these big plant controllers, these kind of hybrid building controllers slash actual plant and IO controllers. So you'll see dynamic device binding. This is your who is, who has or I, who is I am, sorry, and dynamic object is who has I have, if I'm remembering correctly, so I am, is device has, is object binding. And then you don't see this as much anymore. A lot of people implement their own backup structures, especially those that rely on SQL databases and whatnot. But this is backup to file, restore from file. These are atomic atomic operations. These atomic operations mean they do a complete file creation. So this is a complete backup, complete restore, little nerdy info that's not really necessarily pertinent to you. Let's talk through some optional features. So Backup and Restore is optional. Multiple network protocol support is optional, segmentation, allowing large messages to be broken down into smaller segments. You don't see this so much anymore on the IP side of things, but you definitely still see it on the MSTP side of things. This is where your like MTU, your maximum transmission units come into play. See foreign device registration. This is where maybe you want to add a foreign device. Just this is typically done by entering the actual IP address, and you just essentially hard code this foreign device in private transfer services. I'm not really going to get into that. I'm not going to get into additional object types, lighting, output, loop pulse converters, they're not highly used. And then network capabilities. So this is where we're going to define our network capabilities. And this is important for you, because this is where you're going to go and look to find out, how do you actually play with the system? Let's see. Let's say you get a train unit right with a BACnet card on it, and you don't know what it's capable if you can look up its BTL listing, and you can see, hey, it's got BACnet IP, maybe it's got master slave token passing, which, by the way, I'm going to excuse me clarify for those of you, Rs, 485, 90 638.4k BOD, those are the two BOD rates that in order to be BTL compliant, you're required to support. So if you're deploying onto an existing site with systems, know that pretty much every BACnet compliant system should support 9600 or 36.8 BOD, or, sorry, 38.4 bod. And so if you need to change baud rates so that everything's communicating the same baud rate, those are usually safe baud rates. This becomes, honestly less important for building automation integration and more, for when you're tying into third party sensors and actuators, because those typically will support only those two baud rates, BACnet, Ethernet, we're not going to go into that. Not many people use that anymore. IPv six. We're not seeing a whole ton of deployment of that. I'd be very interested if you're seeing a lot of IPv six deployment. I personally am not, but I'd be interested to see if you are BACnet point to point. Not a whole lot of that either, honestly, like BACnet over Ethernet and point to point are largely gone. We do still have some ARCNet in certain manufacturers that's not on here, foreign device registration. I do see this quite a bit. And then router and Gateway support, so the ability to act as a router or gateway. What's interesting on this is it doesn't mention bbmd on my slide. That's a miss on my part, but it will typically tell you if it has a bbmd capability. That's BACnet broadcast management device. Okay, so with all this being said, let's go back here and let's take a look at another device. I'm just gonna pick on this device right here. Let's open this bad boy up.
Phil Zito 19:38
Not quite sure what's in here? Okay, so now, with everything you just learned, I want you to go to the BTL site, obviously on a separate tab, so you don't lose this episode that you're watching. And I want you to read this. And I wonder, now that we've. This past 20 minutes together, if this reads a little differently to you, if maybe now that you look at this and you see the BACnet advanced application controller, and you see right, data sharing, read property client, data sharing, read property server, data sharing, read property, multiple client, data sharing, read property multiple server. And so quickly you can kind of tell what capabilities right, dynamic device binding, client server, dynamic object binding, client server. So we start to see we have a lot of capabilities. And you'll notice there's more stuff on this than what I shared, as far as the building blocks, like right here we see our Cav client and server, or, sorry, cov client and server. I did not go and put every possible bib on the slides I shared with you. Also, my hope is, as you scroll through this, you start to notice, hey, there's a bunch of different object types, right? And we can see the capabilities of these objects. And then when we get down here, eventually to the networking which I thought it had on this, maybe I missed it somewhere. I might have missed the network on here. It's quite possible, or they didn't include it. Oh, I did. I went through it too fast. Sorry about that, folks. Here we go, so we can see right here, BACnet, ARCNet, right? I told you, some folks still use ARCNet. And we see what baud rate it is, and then we see MSTP, and we see right that 9600 and that 38.4 the two required baud rates. And then we see two additional baud rates right there. So this, if you went to a job and it was BACnet IP, and everything was back net IP, you would know that in order to communicate with this, you would need a gateway or a router, because right now this only supports ARCNet or MSTP. We also see that this does not have a bbmd capability, so this is not going to be doing your device discovery. And we can see this is not implementing back net secure connect. Now, if I go over here and I go all the way up, and I go to my BTL listings again, and I search a BACnet building controller. And we'll just grab this one right here. This is the first one. I bring this up, right? We see BACnet, builder, controller. We see all these different bibs. It supports, right, all these different objects, object types, and I go all the way down to the network. This is a router, and it is a bbmd So, and this is BACnet IP, and it provides foreign device registration as well as regular BACnet and registration. And it has a bunch of different baud rates. So we can tell this device is going to allow us to discover and map in additional devices, because it acts as a router, as well as acting as an IP broadcast management device. All right, folks, I hope this episode helped you a ton everything's available at podcast at smartbuilding academy.com forward slash 467 once again, that's podcast@smartbuildingscademy.com forward slash 467 thank you so much for watching this episode. I hope it's been valuable to you. If you have found it valuable, please go and share this if it's on LinkedIn with your comments. If it's on YouTube, please like and subscribe. If it's on Facebook or Apple podcasts or Spotify, please go leave us a review. Share this with the people you know. And like I said, if you're trying to learn building automation and you don't know where to start, go check out our free skill assessment at smart buildings academy.com forward slash skills. Once again, that is smart buildings academy.com. Forward slash skills. Thank you everybody, and I hope you have an awesome rest of your week. Take care. Bye.
