Virtual gateway

A BACnet configuration can contain many BACnet objects. If all are configured in one flat structure, maintenance and browsing becomes difficult.

Therefore Go-IoT has introduced the BACnet/IoT Virtual Gateway, where BACnet objects can be grouped behind the virtual gateways and virtual BACnet devices.

Example: If managing hundreds of 1-Wire temperature sensors in a big building, those can be grouped behind 10 virtual gateways, one for each storey. In the same installation there might be 10 energy meters on Modbus. Those could be grouped behind the same virtual gateways.

Name: This is the name of the virtual gateway.

Bus: This is the peripheral bus for the virtual gateway. The peripheral buses available are dependant on the controller attached to the top-level device.

DNET: This is the destination network number address of the virtual gateway.

Enabled: Determines if the virtual gateway is set to be enabled. If it is not enabled, then the underlying devices are also disabled.

Autoconfigured: To do

Some of the gateways contain BACnet templates, that are used to automatically create and configure BACnet devices from protocols like LoRaWAN etc. Go here for more information.

Some of the gateways are special variants.

A special variant of the virtual gateway is the BACnet APDU-to-APDU gateway (A2AG). A2AGs are used to virtualize BACnet servers behind slow master/slave media like PINGO. Accessing those directly via BACnet requests, would be slow and cause timeouts in the requesting BACnet client. To solve this problem an A2AG, has its values ready by intelligent polling, when requested by BACnet client. Similar happens when writing to such a BACnet server. The A2AG returns immediately when a BACnet client writes to an BACnet object behind slow media, but afterwards the A2AG starts writing the value over the slow media as a background task. If that fails the value is rolled back in the A2AG BACnet object and it's Reliability property set to a fault value.

The BACnet servers behind the slow media are presented in a table, only visible when the virtual gateway is a A2AG. The content of the table can be edited via the New..., Edit... and Delete buttons.

Instance nr.: This is read-only and is automatically set by the A2AG, when running. The Instance nr. maps to a device in the BACnet setup under the A2A-gateway.

MAC address: The MAC address of the BACnet server on the slow media. The MAC address format will be validated, when entering the MAC address.

Alternative ID: An alternative identifier for the BACnet server on the slow media. Allowed values are 0, 1, 2 and 3.

Protocol: Options are Not known, BACnet APDU-to-APDU, Pure passthrough and RDMS.

Retries: Determines how many retries should be attempted before giving up, after a request fails. Allowed values are 0 - 10.

Action: This is the action, performed by the A2AG, in regards to the BACnet setup under the A2A-gateway. After the action is performed, it is reset to No action. Options are No action and Add/update all. If the Instance nr. is larger than zero, then additional options are Add new objects, Remove deleted objects and Remove device.