The BACnet Server API for Linux, Windows 95/NT/2000/XP can be used to build a BACnet Server which can be accessed as a BACnet device. It can also be used as a BACnet Client for reading/writing to other BACnet devices on the network. It's purpose is to make real time information available via BACnet Services so that other BACnet devices can read/write to the BACnet Server, and it also acts as a client that can control other devices. It's most common use would be as a gateway for a Non BACnet system to allow other BAcnet Devices to monitor and control the Non BACnet system. It can also be used as a global controller capable of monitoring and controlling other BACnet Devices. It supports BACnet/IP, BACnet Ethernet, BACnet MSTP, BACnet PTP and the Anex H Data Link Layers.
Real Time Data from the Non BACnet system is stored inside BACnet Objects which are accessible from other devices on the network. The information can be stored in Analog or Binary Objects in one or more internal devices. The BACnet Server has the ability to act as more than 1 device to allow points to be grouped in a logical manner. An example of this might be for a gateway to monitor 6 identical Chillers each with 500 internal points. 6 internal Devices can be created each with 500 BACnet objects. Each of the 6 devices can be given a name to represent the 6 Chillers, and the same addressing and object names can be used for the 500 BACnet objects for each Chiller. This simplifies the gateway and reduces the size of the object list which has a size of 500 per chiller rather than 3000 if all points were inside the same device.
The BACnet Server can act as a global controller to provide monitoring and control over the BACnet network. It can be used to receive alarms, read/write to other devices, send any service etc.
Any application built for Windows can easily be recompiled for Linux. All the samples in the tutorials can be compiled on both platforms.
Goto the Modules - Installation section of the help documentation and then the Modules section for a step by step procedure for creating an application BACnet Server using the API.
The Windows version of the BACnet Server API is a dll that can be built in to an application using Visual C++. The BACnet Server API requires the installation of WinPcap version 3.0 (driver & dlls) available at http://www.winpcap.polito.it and supplied in the winpcap directory of the zip file, double click on WinPcap_3_0.exe to install the drivers. The drivers can be unistalled via Add/Remove programs.
The Linux version of the BACnet Server API is a shared library called libbacnapi. To build an application for linux, libbacnapi must be linked to the application.
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