The S4 Group’s development partner, Klaus Obermeier, of Obermeier Software, visited our Utah office during the month of November. Prior to coming to the office, he created a list of work items that we needed to jointly complete to ensure the release readiness of the 1.50 Phase 2 BACnet-N2 router. Needless to say it was an intense month, and Klaus led the S4 team to accomplishing the goal of a stable release of the 1.5 system.
The 1.5 Phase 2 system has increased functionality.
Added Upstream N2 support (the ability to co-exist with the Metasys® supervisory controller)
Added Scripting support (the ability to transform the data provided by native N2 points)
Improvements to BACnet COV support (fixed a bug where points in fault were not being reported)
Improved N2 COS polling algorithms (changed the algorithm so that these polls are spread out over time instead of being blasted to the bus in bulk when a N2 master is not in the configuration)
Improved caching support (added use cases where we utilized the built-in S4 caching service to improve throughput and protect the N2 bus from excessively aggressive client applications)
Fine tuned the N2 bus sharing algorithms so that the Metasys® supervisory controller and all other applications (BACnet, S4 caching, COS polling, etc.) get a fair allocation of time on the N2 bus.
Improved performance of the S4 Open Management Console and its use of Web Sockets for communication to the N2 Router.
Enhanced the Live Point Monitoring capability of the Management Console (eliminated the long run time failure bug, included use of the S4 cache for data values, added full support for On Text, Off Text, and MSV text enumerations, and other improvements)
S4 partners have been waiting for this build because it allows them to deliver on commitments to their customers and start them on a transition path to BACnet compliant smart buildings and embracing BIoT. All existing 1.40 and 1.50 installations are eligible to receive this upgrade. We will be rolling it out over the next two weeks. Please contact us to coordinate an upgrade of your systems if you do not hear from us soon.
The immediate follow-on to this BACnet-N2 Router release will be a 1.50 OPC-N2 Router. Schedules for this will be announced in the near future. This release sets the stage for us to publish an API for our 2.0 release which will enable us to move much faster in the future to offer new integrations and new protocols that we publish to.