Here’s a little something that happened to me and shows how incredibly powerful Wacnet’s REPL is when you need something that isn’t already programmed in the software.
We recently were tasked to use Vigilia to record a subset of a BACnet network. The only thing we knew was that many devices were MS/TP, that the network was composed of multiple buildings, and that we had a few dozen devices to record with IDs between 20000 and 20999.
Up to this point, everything is pretty standard and can easily be handled just by firing up Wacnet.
As I did countless time before, I started Wacnet and scanned the
network. I sent a Who-Is broadcast, expecting to see the devices I
was looking for. Plenty of devices answered, but not those I was
looking for. In fact, in the 20xxx range, less than 5 answered.
It’s not surprising that a few devices fail to answer with the I-Am
broadcast, especially in congested networks. One can usually just wait
a few minutes/hours and all the devices will have announced
themselves. But not this time.
On this particular case, I had to wait for days to come clause to the number of devices I was expecting.
This was simply ridiculous. Nobody is going to wait a week after you start a software before seeing any effect.
But the problem remained… the devices were ignoring (or couldn’t
answer) my Who-Is request. Nasty situation…
I talked about my situation on the BACnet mailing list. While there’s multiple possible causes, there’s a hacky solution that should work for most of them.
Mr. Hartman from Trane summarizes the problem quite well:
(…) broadcasts can and will get lost, especially when there are a lot of them. If you broadcast a Who-Is with no parameters, ALL devices have to answer, so you will get a flurry of I-Am, some of which may get dropped.
To discover the devices I’m looking for, I have to minimize my network
usage and send a ranged Who-Is.
I’ll do more than that: I will send a Who-Is for a single device.
This way I make sure there’s absolutely no network congestion.
Here is where Wacnet’s REPL shines: Without the need to recompile anything, I can make new functions on-the-fly.
Wacnet is using the function
find-remote-devices
to send the Who-Is broadcast. Here’s the new function targeting a
single device:
And then a little function to scan IDs within a range using this method:
After that, all I had to do was to enter (scan-range 20000 20999),
wait around 3 minutes and I had the complete devices list.
No need to recompile or download any additional widget; I could create my own function directly when and where I needed it.
