Tyler Wiegand

The major impetus for creating this software was that there were a number of unaddressable concerns with the third party backend we were utilizing with Optimize in order to pull BACnet and other communication protocol's data into our system. One of these concerns was that if there was a "stale" piece of data, or an unresponsive controller device, we wouldn't know it until a month later when we saw a long trendlog of the same value for a particular object. In order to correct this one thing, an entire redesign including a C-based open-sourced library that enabled me to have more finite control of the information flow was necessary.

While I was using Vuejs for real-time data messaging client-side, this time I was using a Websocket (using Redis, Socket.io, and Nodejs) to do the communicating rather than Event Source. Similarly, since we were no longer using our previous backend software, I was now gathering this information via a makeshift API that I created to interact with the command line toolkit mentioned previously. So now, anytime I needed to update a value, I could simply write $object->readProperty(85); 85 being the BACnet array value for "present_value."

One of the big advantages of using our new system is that I could design completely independent System Status Boards for each location. This allowed the client to view data with updates at least every five minutes, but in most cases it was pushed via the BACnet's Subscription COV server update. This was injested by running the BACnet server process in Symfony's Process Component. Basically it ran in the background, and read each line every two seconds. All new information was sent over to be updated in the database, and Laravel was set up to run an update job that sent the websocket update anytime the model was updated.

Likewise, when I came across jobs that wouldn't run (basically the device wasn't responding), I had to exclude them from future read-property requests or it would really gum up the job update queues. And, unfortunately for me, this was before Laravel Horizon was out, so I was stuck with just viewing keys in Redis as quickly as possible. So, anytime a value failed to update, I made the device "offline," and changed all values to "N/A" to make it obvious to the client's engineers that something was amiss with that physical piece of equipment, or the connection to it.

I actually had to pore over some C code and change the output of the Subscription COV event in the BACnet stack library and recompile, which I was NOT comfortable doing! But it worked out. This allowed us to get those subscription events pushed from the controller device instead of just manually asking for all updates.

After about a year we realized that the BACnet Stack we were using was slowing us down, and the desired amount of updates per second just didn't cut it for a commercial product. We began talks with SoftDel which didn't pan out, and were in the midst of striking a deal with Polarsoft, one of the original BACnet vendors, when AOG ran into some money issues. I was really excited to replace the current BACnet stack with different command line solution that would handle most of the controller updates, and communicate in JSON rather than STDIN/STDOUT.

At our peak, we had this system installed in about fifteen locations, with some of the more notable locations being Fiesta Henderson Casino, Green Valley Ranch, Town Square, Sam's Town, and the Aliante Casino. I personally configured every server with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, configured the web server (NGINX) for use with Laravel, and provided the custom networking setup that each different IT department required in order to give remote access to the system. There were HVAC techs on our team, but I was the only developer for this project.