Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Kyle Lanclos <[email protected]> · Fri, 16 Dec 2016 16:54:41 -1000

I'm trying to communicate with an Alerton BCM-ETH controller via
BACnet. I'm using the ORNL driver to do so:

http://ics-web.sns.ornl.gov/webb/BACnet/

I can successfully read analog and boolean values. My IOC will poll
each value at the configured interval, and I can read/write the
channels with impunity. However, my write operations are not resulting
in any extra communication with the controller (as seen by wireshark).
I see the poll requests to read the present value but I never see
anything attempting to _set_ the present value.

I can write values using a demo program that's included with the
bacnet-stack library. I see the packets on wireshark, but any changes
requested aren't necessarily reflected in my EPICS channels. Not sure
what to make of that.

I'm hoping there's something simple that I'm doing wrong. Here are
some example sections of my IOC initialization sequence.

epicsEnvSet("EPICS_BASE","/usr/local/epics/default/base")
epicsEnvSet("IOC","alerton")

dbLoadDatabase "$(EPICS_BASE)/dbd/epics2bacnet.dbd"
epics2bacnet_registerRecordDeviceDriver pdbbase

bacnetDriverInterfaceName("enp0s20f0u4u4u2")
bacnetDriverPortNumber(47808)

bacnetDefineServer("Alerton", 10001, 47808, 25)

bacnetListServerInfo(5)
bacnetDriverStart(1)
bacnetDriverVerbosity(1)

dbLoadRecords("alerton.db", "IOC_NAME=$(IOC)")
iocInit

...and then a pair of records from the included database:

record(ao, "$(IOC_NAME):A000_VAL"){
  field(DTYP, "BacNet")
  field(OUT, "@Alerton 2 0 85")
  field(SCAN, ".5 second")
}

record(bo, "$(IOC_NAME):B000_VAL"){
  field(DTYP, "BacNet")
  field(OUT, "@Alerton 5 0 85")
  field(SCAN, ".5 second")
  field(ZNAM, "False")
  field(ONAM, "True")
}

Thanks in advance for any guidance. I apologize if I don't get back to
you right away, I won't have access to this equipment for a while.

--Kyle

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System