Exposing network engine data to M-Series Workstations - Metasys - LIT-1201531 - System Integration - BACnet Controller Integration - 11.0

To allow the M-Series Workstation or third-party BACnet devices to interface to network engine devices, you must follow specific guidelines when configuring the network engine.

All network engine objects that are exposed as BACnet standard objects can be accessed from other BACnet devices and the M3 Workstation or M5 Workstation software.

For information on configuring the network engine, refer to the Metasys SMP Help (LIT-1201793).

For M-Series Workstations, configure the network engine with the following considerations. These considerations may or may not apply to other third-party BACnet devices. Consult the documentation for the third-party BACnet device for more information.

• Use ASCII text strings for BACnet Encoding Type in the Site object.

• Make the network engine Item Reference as short as possible because the network engine Item Reference is used as the basis for building up the BACnet OLE for Process Controls tag name in the M-Series Workstations.

• Enable BACnet Intrinsic Alarming or set up Event Enrollment Alarming, including BACnet event notification (Notification Class objects), in the network engine for all objects that should report event messages to M-Alarm.

• Do not set up a domain name for the network engine's Device Object. Setting up a domain name causes name changes for every NAE point object, making them unavailable to the M-Series Workstation.

• For the standard M-Series workstations, use only supported enumeration sets, or the data does not appear correctly. For the list of enumeration sets, refer to the Metasys® System Enumeration Sets Technical Bulletin (LIT-12011361).

• The safest alternative is to use the States set for the attributes that need enumerations.

• The generic integration object (GIO) is not a BACnet standard object. Do not use the GIO for network engine objects accessed by other BACnet devices or the M-Series Workstation. Use standard analog and binary objects for interfacing points from the network engine to other BACnet devices or the M-Series Workstation.

• If more than one network engine device is interfaced to the M5 Workstation or M3 Workstation, and if these interfaced devices need to exchange information between each other, the network engines must be set up as a Metasys system site, with one NAE defined as the Site Director.

Table 1 details the versions of the network engine that the M-Series Workstation can interface. This table does not apply to the M3 integral and M5i workstations available in Europe.