Stateful BACnet Scraper

This application works with the Building Agent BACnet library to provide stateful and modular control of

• Device discovery
• Device OID lookup
• Device polling/data scraping

Discovered devices and oids are persisted to a Mongo database, decoupling discovery from the polling process.

Project funded by NREL's Commercial Building LDRD Project for Building Agent. Read more about Building Agent:

• NREL-Developed Software Tackles Building Efficiency and Offers Cost Savings
• Progress on Enabling an Interactive Conversation Between Commercial Building Occupants and Their Building To Improve Comfort and Energy Efficiency
• Building Agent Software: Occupancy Feedback for Building Controls

Installation

• JRuby must be installed. We run the application using JRuby 1.7.4 and cannot confirm compatibility with other versions of JRuby.
• Mongo must be installed and running.
• Clone this repo and run bundle install.
• Clone and build the Building Agent BACnet Scraper. The BACnet library should be installed at the same level as BACnet-state:

/my-project/bacnet
/my-project/bacnet-state

• Add your connection details to config/mongoid.yml.
• Optionally adjust settings in the config/filter.json and config/logging.properties files.

Execution

The following sample scripts are provided:

• discover_devices.rb runs only device discovery and updates the known_devices collection in Mongo. jruby discover_devices.rb -m 0 -M 40000 -databus false -dev en1
• discover_oids.rb runs oid discovery for all complete known_devices and updates the oids collection. The filter is also applied to set polling interval for all oids. jruby discover_oids.rb -databus false -dev en1
• poll.rb initializes polling of all complete known_devices at intervals determined by the oids collection. Note that both device and oid discovery must run before polling can begin.
  jruby discover_oids.rb -databus false -dev en1
• run.rb is intended as a complete solution for up to date polling and discovery on a BACnet network. The script does the following:
  • Immediately schedules polling for all known_devices.
  • Schedules device discovery to run every midnight.
  • Schedules oid discovery and refresh to run every 10 minutes for max of 20 devices each iteration.
  • Schedules detection and polling kick off for newly discovered devices to run every 30 minutes. jruby run.rb -databus false -dev en1 -m 0 -M 40000

Options

The BACnet-state application exposes the same options as the Building Agent BACnet Scraper. Details available with that project. Note that you must either set the databus option to false or provide databus credentials. The -dev option is required.

Caveats

• While our scripts use small threadpools, the code is fundamentally not threadsafe. Core BACnet functionality is provided by the BACnet4j (included with the Building Agent BACnet scraper). All requests on the BACnet network must be made via a single instance of the LocalDevice, which is bound to a network device. This object is not threadsafe. In our experience, increasing multithreading results in bogus "Device Timeout" messages, but no data integrity issues.