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.

Embedded Systems Boston 2011

Attended ESC Boston 2011.
http://esc.eetimes.com/boston/expo

Was hoping to meet up with a few of the familiar faces and ask them about new trends in the industry. Keen interest in...

managed code/language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_code

ARM processors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

Power over Ethernet 802.3af and 802.3at.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet

To twist Archimedes -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes
Give me enough memory and processing power ....

Distributed Systems, Small is Beautiful

Have been thinking about distributed "systems" lately... and how small components for such systems can be better, or how they are better. There are many systems in which resources can be distributed. This entry is about setting the stage for a series of entries on distributed ways of doing things, ways where small can be beautiful.

Here is a taste of the sort of systems meant:

• Computation or control.


• Storage.


• Housing or shelter.


• Workplace, office or shop.


• Transportation.


• Energy.

The question/issue might be about temporality of resources - permanent or transient, owned or leased/borrowed. Or maybe it is a question of scale and how big each element should be in the hierarchy.

Embedded Systems Conference - Boston 2010

Was to ESC (Embedded Systems Conference) Boston 2010 in late September.
http://esc-boston.techinsightsevents.com/

Here are a few highlights:

The platform and OS (operating systems) wars/debates are largely over - so much so that no one even bothers to mention the issue of OS and processor anymore. It is "assumed".

When a generic OS is used, only a few generic interfaces are really supported in all cases - TCP/IP, and serial ports.

For 8bit and similar the continuing players are 8051, Atmel-AtMega and Microchip-PIC architectures. Again this is mostly implied and few speak of it.

Software houses and tool chains vendors are talking about the ways they go beyond simple TCP/IP to get information to "cloud services".

Companies who formerly only sold components or built PC boards are transforming into complete end-to-end design-build companies where they go all the way from design to delivering boxes of the required products ready for you to sell (even with labels and software installed and locked).

Other attendees included trade associations, magazine/book vendors, Flash/SSD providers, tool/environment vendors, logic/JTAG analyzers, emulator vendors and wireless vendors.