[00:00] In this lesson, we'll look at using the BACnet driver. Our driver allows an ignition gateway to communicate with other devices using BACnet over IP. If you've ever configured a device connection using any of our other drivers before, then this will be a little different as there's a prerequisite configuration we have to make first called a local device. This step registers the ignition gateway is presence as a BACnet device on a network. So let's get started. I'm on the config section of my gateway. We need to head down, I'm going to scroll down here under the BACnet heading. There should be a local devices page or link. I'm going to click on this. Now you'd only see that link and this page, if you have the BACnet driver installed on the gateway, if you don't, then you won't see that link. I don't have any local devices configured. So let's click the create new local device link. As with most of these forms on the gateway, we need to provide a name for this configuration.

[01:03] Now, a few of these fields are actually required aside from the name property, which is also required. Let's start with the bind address here. Now, depending on your network architecture, this could just be your gateway's IP address. Now in a later step in this video, we're going to configure what's called a remote device, which is basically configuration information for some hardware that we want our gateway to communicate with using BACnet over IP. If that remote device only sends broadcast packets, as opposed to being able to send unicast messages, then you'll need to set the bind address here to 0.0.0.0. Now my case that isn't true, I can actually just use my gateway's IP address. So today I'm working with 10.100.70 and 12, it looks like. You can specify the port down here. It just so happens that I don't need to make any changes here, but that is the default port our driver tries to use for our BACnet communications. And we have a broadcast address. Again, this depends on how your gateway is configured and how your network set up.

[02:00] But in my case, I can actually just copy my gateway's IP address here and paste it down below. I'm going to skip the network prefix length, and talk about the device number and network number. These are both identifiers and are part of the BACnet protocol. So device number is just the device identifier on the BACnet side of things. This just needs to be set to something that's different from every other BACnet device identifier on the network. Network number is just the BACnet network assignments. So what you need to type into these two fields here really depends on how your BACnet architecture has been laid out. Now, in my case, I have a very simple architecture. It's just my local system here and the remote device I'm going to be connecting to in a moment. So I can leave these fields with their default values. I'm going to scroll down a little bit more here. And we do have these BBMD fields, which stand for BACnet Broadcast Management Device. Now, in my case here, I don't actually need to type anything in because I'm not using a BBMD.

[03:02] If you are using a BBMD, then you'd simply enter the address and the port for that management device, that's on the same network as the remote device you're planning on interacting with. So you do need to have a good idea on how your network is laid out, as well as where exactly that device you're trying to interact with is. Now say you are using BBMDs, and you have a couple different BBMDs. So the way you're supposed to handle that is by creating multiple local devices. So multiple of these fields here. So you can have a whole bunch of them, that's why it's a separate step from the remote device step, which you'll see in a moment. So I'll go ahead and I'll create the new local device. And it now exists as an entry here. So I mentioned it earlier, but if we needed to create more of these local devices, because we're using multiple BBMDs, we just create additional ones here, but we can always come back and do that later. So that was step one here, we have the local device. Now we need to create the remote device configuration.

[04:02] Again, still on the config section here, I'm going to scroll down, and under OPC UA, let's go to the device connections page. Now this part might feel really familiar if you've used our drivers before. Let's click the create new device link. And from our list of options here, I'm going to scroll down just a little bit. We do have our BACnet over IP option. I'll keep on scrolling down after selecting that, and click the next button. And let's give this a name. You can also fill out the description to make it a bit more transparent on what this configuration is pointing to. And we do have this local device drop down here. Now this part is mandatory. So we couldn't create the remote device unless we had the local device configured first, which is why I did that first. So I do need the network address of the device I'm trying to interact with. Now, this case looks like I'm going to 10.20.4.24. I happened to be using this port here so I can skip over that.

[05:02] And we have our remote device number, which defaults to one, but in most cases, you're not going to be using one. So again, this is another one of those identifiers. Now my colleague that sets up the hardware for me is telling me that I need to enter one two one five zero zero zero as the remote device number. I'm going to scroll down a bit more here and there's some more properties that do have some descriptions here. I'm not going to spend the time talking about them here. We do realist these in the user manual if you're curious. I'm just going to click the create new device button. And the status should start with initializing, and then if everything goes according to plan should end up with initialized. Just like that. When our device configuration here tries to reach out to the remote device, it collects some initial information. Specifically an object list and a listing of supported properties for each object. It then caches these lists. So later on, if these lists change in the device, we'll need to come over here and update this device configuration. Which you can do by clicking on more and then selecting invalidate browse.

[06:04] Which then triggers the re-initialization process. Now that's it for the device configuration. We're ready to go on that end. Now we can start looking at accessing some of the points in the device and incorporating the tag system here in ignition. But we'll look at that in a later lesson.