S4 has joined the EnOcean Alliance

For those of you not familiar with this exciting technology, EnOcean and EnOcean Alliance members have developed a wide range of wireless and battery free sensors, switches, controllers, and actuators. Because all members of the alliance follow the same set of standards all products are interoperable.

There are multiple BACnet to EnOcean gateways available today but none of them provide full functionality and bi-directional support. S4 plans to deliver a BACnet-EnOcean Router and associated EnOcean Hotspot technology that will enable all EnOcean domains in a building to be brought together as enterprise assets utilizing BACnet IP.

The high level design has been completed for some time. We’ve recently put a lot of effort mapping BACnet functionality into EnOcean telegrams to identify places where there are challenges in offering full functionality in the gateway. Our findings have been shared with the BACnet wireless working group and with the EnOcean Alliance and we are all working together to find the best path to providing this service. The major areas needing work include:

• Providing support for devices that are inactive except when an external stimulus generates the energy to make the device operational.
• Providing an Override and Release mechanism within the EnOcean technology.
• Emulating the Priority Array within the gateway.

As part of our membership in the EnOcean Alliance we will be helping to mold the direction of the EnOcean technology by working with the technical working groups. Our experience in building the OPC-N2 Router and BACnet-N2 Router has paved the way for this project and helped us to identify areas where additional planning and coordination are needed.

We just completed a paper that is being published by the EnOcean Alliance in multiple languages. The paper takes the concepts introduced in our Connected World Conference presentation and expands them in greater detail to discuss the benefits of integrating the BACnet and EnOcean protocols through a gateway. After that paper is edited and published we’ll also publish it on our web site.