The hard work of Hark’s dedicated Software Development team shines brightly in this intuitive, user-friendly application. Designed to use in conjunction with Hark’s services and solutions, the BACnet to MQTT adapter means great things for current and future clients.
If you didn’t know, MQTT and BACnet are two communications protocols that don’t typically communicate with one another. Generally, MQTT is preferred by developers due to its ease of use, speed and user-friendliness – for that reason, apps like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger use MQTT. BACnet, on the other hand, is known for being slightly less convenient for developers, generally, because more steps must be taken in order to read values, but many devices do still use it, so the BACnet to MQTT adapter has heaps of value.
This is exactly why we wanted to take the best aspects of both worlds and combine them together. Our adapter does the heavy lifting, leaving developers to work with a straightforward application that transcribes BACnet data to the preferable MQTT.
BACnet Device Discovery
Firstly, your estate of connected devices needs to be discovered. Conveniently we’ve installed a big button for that. That means you can casually cruise through the discovery process and move onto configuring individual devices. We’ve made that nice and easy too! You can click on a discovered device to configure what properties should be read from it – temperature data, energy data, airflow data – whatever you like. Objects and properties can be downloaded using yet another conveniently placed button – easy as that.
Once your configurations are set, you can create a “topic name” for the message holding these property values to be sent to. This is where your BACnet message is received by the MQTT Broker. Once you click the save button, the data/message will be published to the configured MQTT Broker once every minute.
MQTT Broker Publishing
Using the MQTT navigation tab you can simply enter the broker details that your BACnet data is being sent to and upload any PFX certificates. It’s as easy as that!
Plug Into Your Existing Hardware
Setting up this self-service protocol adapter will help you to empower your own digital transformation and fully unlock the potential of legacy assets. With just a few clicks of a button, you can get your legacy BACnet devices connected and publishing messages to the MQTT broker and immediately start collecting data in analytical software like The Hark Platform.
If you’d like to know more or see our solutions in action, you can book a demo for free today!
