Tyler Wiegand

Toward the end of my time at Internet Crossroads, I was approached by a friend from my hometown with an idea for a project. He explained the opportunity and I began to create some mockups for them. They liked what I had come up with and working with them became my full time gig in short order. Before long, the business offered to move me out to my hometown and we were fast on our way to version two.

This new venture into HVAC was an interesting marriage of my web development skill set and an entirely different category. There are many forms of automated controls and many brands. Technically, the most ubiquitous standard for this industry is BACnet, an open-source communication protocol that is ratified by ASHRAE, but I found out quickly that different companies adhered to that standard in different ways. There is a core set of functionality that each controller is required to have in order to call itself BACnet compliant, but there's also LonTalk, Modbus, Allen-Bradley has their own network type, Zigbee has their own wireless standard, and many others.

This project entailed months of planning and development with many more months of fine tuning with customer feedback. Even with many clients using the product, the company I was contracted from ended up falling apart in early 2017. I was picked up as a full time employee of the company that had ordered the software originally.

Even within BACnet, there is a two-wire network, BACnet over ethernet, and BACnet over IP. As you could probably guess, there are many opportunities for inconsistency of setup and bottlenecks among slower communication methods. Of these types, we eventually landed on BACnet over IP as our internal defacto standard, as it ended up playing nicer with different IT groups at different locations. They weren't particularly keen on allowing layer 2 traffic over their networks, and in some cases they were unable to route that traffic over certain VLANs, so this seemed to be the best compromise of speed and compatibility.

I can't stress enough how much of a rapid prototyping environment this was developed in. We were growing quickly and I had to make certain design concessions in order to get a product out.