BACnet and Internet of Things for Systems Managers.

How are BAcnet, Internet of Things, and their requirements, features and users, related? Apologies to Toby Considine. Just cannot get over Internet of Things.

In building automation who does one try to serve? When one goes through the list - owners, operators, and occupiers - it usually comes to the facilities managers - and being a bit more general about what automation we might be talking about - systems managers. System managers are beset by fear. Fear of disruption from all sorts of directions. System managers crave stability and reliability foremost. Efficiency and optimization comes after that. Systems managers are faced with monumental tasks.

In the Internet of Things wave, almost every facet of how a systems platform goes together are up for consideration... security, manageabilty and interoperation are current hot topics. Alan Messer of Samsung showed a great list at a recent MIT IoT event.

Turns out BACnet, as a lingua franca for building automation, has many of the facets well under control.
Especially well covered: clear semantics, great model and defaults, topology definition, simplicity with extensibility, system setup strategies part of architecture (like discoverability).

And there are things BACnet can be served well by from watching and following IoT. Especially techniques in:

• Location awareness.
• Wireless communications.
• Energy harvesting.
• Social information input.
• Raw simplicity (dumb things, simple networks).

BACnet and IoT presentation at Cimetrics.

Toys, Open Source Hardware, Littlebits.

Seems like new important technologies can often get a beach head in toys or playthings. Batteries, Energy harvesting, AI and Watson... Regardless - toys are fun.

It is said there are five proto-toys - seen from the earliest times: ball, doll (including animals), stick/stylus, string/rope/cord, musical-instrument (like wind and percussion instruments) .

Magnifying glass, magnets, and telescopes are some nice more "advanced" toys. Blocks and vehicles come along too. My personal favorites are classic construction toys.

The modern age has brought electronics and tablets as toys. Especially electronic toys and kits. Brings to mind the venerable first handhelds.

At the OHS2013 at MIT was introduced to Littlebits. They gave away a small sample kit. Very intriguing.

And the idea has gotten legs. Search for littlebits pops up many things. There is an Internet of Things connection with the cloudbit.

So it seems littlebits is becoming the Internet of Things construction toy. They want to be an app store for hardware designs with the bitlab.

Littlebits are in many ways "perfect"... though one caveat is cost (for a toy)... but it is understandable. And it leads one to think of alternatives (and a marketplace) - which has its ecosystem benefits (for littlebits and others). Might come back to that in a later blog entry.

For now thinking of ways that the deluxe Popular Science kit might be used -(sorry)- played with *grin*.