BACnet2Brick

A virtual BACnet device that can connect your BACnet to a Brick Server.

Features

• Discovery of bacnet devices and objects.
• Registeration of the identified devices and objecst to a Brick Server.
• Periodic publication of the data to Brick Server.
• A gRPC server that can receive actuation request, which is delivered to actual BACnet devices. (under development)

Requirements

• This code has been tested on Ubuntu. It may work for other OSes without guarantee.
• This tool assumes BACnet/IP protocol though it can potentially work with BACnet/MSTP. Please let the maintainers know if you need to use this for BACnet/MSTP.
• You need a machine that can communicate with the BACnet devices in the BACnet network. It's oftens implemented as a subnet.
  • If you need to continously post the data to an endpoint like Brick Server, your machine should be able to reach the endpoint as well.

Installation

Install necessary packages

1. python3 -m venv env
2. source env/bin/activate
3. pip install -r requirements.txt

Update BACpypes for custom fields.

Your BACnet devices might have a custom ObjectProperty such as JCI_NAME. If you want to retrieve them, you have to add the information inside the bacpypes package as well.

Example

Apply patch configs/BACKPYPES_JCI.patch to the installed bacpypes package. (usually at <env path>/lib/python3.6/site-packages/bacpypes. This lets the script read JCI_NAME property.

(Optional): Install Brick Server.

1. This is only necessary if you want to communicate with a Brick Server.
2. You need to have a machine (raspberry pi, a VM, or any Linux hosting machine) that have accessibility of both BACnet devices (BACnet/IP) and your Brick Server (e.g., the Internet).

Getting Started

Configure BACpypes.ini

1. Create configs/BACpypes.ini based on configs/BACpypes~.ini.
2. Change the parameters. Refer to https://github.com/JoelBender/bacpypes for more details.

Configure Brick2BACnet

1. Create configs/b2b_config.json based on configs/b2b_config.json.template.
2. Change the parameters.
   • object_custom_fields refers to the custom fields you manually added above.
3. (Optional) If you need to post the results into a Brick Server, please refer to https://github.com/brickschema/brick-server to spin up one.
   1. You can get a jwt_token from your Brick Server.

How to use it?

• b2b --help to list available commands.
  • b2b discovery --help to get help for discovery
  • b2b connector --help to get help for the connector
• b2b discovery: This discovers all the BACnet devices and objects and store them in a sqlite db.
• b2b connector: This periodically polls all the points and push them to a Brick Server. When activated, it can receive actuation requests as well.

Example Commands

• ./b2b discovery --target-devices 123,124 --registerbrick-server: Discover all objects from BACnet devices, 123 and 125 and register them at a designated Brick Server
• ./b2b connector --target-devices 123,124: Periodically update the objects' data in the BACnet devices 123 and 124 to the Brick Server.
  • Use --receive-actuation to activate actuation (under dev)

Tutorial

1. Make sure your hosting machine has the connection to both BACnet devices and a Brcik Server.
2. Create configs/b2b_config.json based on configs/b2b_config.json.template.
3. Run `b2b discovery --register-brickserver`` to automatically register all the discovered devices and objects in to the Brick Server.
4. Run b2b connector to periodically push all the data to the Brick Server.

Additional References:

1. OpenAgricultureFoundation's bacnet wrapper
2. ReadProperty.py and WhoIsIAm.py in bacpypes samples