I’ve got a T3-TB unit that I’m trying to determine its’ viability as a replacement for a ‘standard’ BACnet router (CC BASRT-B). I’ve got two BACnet/MSTP devices installed in my test network: a Dent Power Meter and a Badger Ultrasonic flow meter. When I connect this trunk to the T3-TB module, it does not discover either unit. If I take the network trunk and plug it into my BASRT-B router, all of the devices are discovered using the internal Yabe tool:
I believe that I have my TB configured properly, and the ‘Network Health’ shows a ton of TX/RX traffic with no errors, but no devices are discovered in the T3000 tree under the TB, and no devices are visible when running Yabe natively.
Both the T3000 software and the unit firmware have been updated to the current latest version
Our team is out for the local holiday till Feb5 but there’s a few things I can suggest and comment on here;
At Tab1, this looks like a UDP ethernet network scan of bacnet devices using Yabe. However in your troubleshooting description above you are mentioning RS485 subnet scanning. Could use some clarification on that please.
Tab2: I see a T3-22i set up directly on the ethernet network. Normally you would set up expansion IO under one of the T3 controllers using RS485, that way you can directly use the intrinsic commands like VALVE101 = PID1 rather than having to integrate as external bacnet objects: 44434AO4 = PID1 for example.
Tab3 shows a scan at the office here, all temco subnet devices show up in a sub-tree below the associated T3 controller. Note that T3000 is not well set up to discover 3rd party devices like Yabe does.
Tab4: One small thing I notice is the gateway should probably be 192.168.86.1, this doesnt affect your ability to discover devices though.
Tab5: Are you able to contact any of your subnet devices using the communications settings showing there, by direct cable connection to your PC for example. This setting needs to match your network devices exactly.
Tab6: You can try putting in a test program in the T3 controller to read a few IO from your 3rd party devices into local variables and watch what happens here in the network points dialog.
Tab7: Each device on the subnet requires a unique address, including the T3 controller itself. Make sure the panel ID is set to a unique number.
Thanks for the reply - I’ll try to reply by topic…
Tab1: Yabe detects all BACnet devices on my network - the RS485 devices on the trunk while it’s connected to the BASRT-B router are exposed just like the Native BACnet/IP devices are shown (the router is at 192.168.86.27 in this image below:
My goal with the T3-TB is to determine if I can connect a BACnet MSTP trunk to it and communicate/control the RS485 devices via BACnet/IP, like I can with a standard router like the BASRT-B unit.
Tab2: The other Temco controllers are just bench samples - I won’t be using them to implement any programming (they’re not associated with this issue)
Tab5: If I connect the MSTP trunk to my computer, I can see the devices using a Yabe scan of the serial port. If I connect that trunk to the T3-TB, I can’t see any devices when I scan the IP network.
I’m assuming, based on my tests that this unit doesn’t function as I would expect, like any other BACnet/IP to MSTP router.
I can confirm that the T3-TB functions as an IP-to-MSTP router. It transparently passes BACnet traffic to BACnet instances on its subnets, allowing you to refer to subnet BACnet objects as if they were on the IP network.
It seems that Yabe/BASRT-B takes this a step further by displaying the subnet devices in its tree view as if they were ‘IP’ devices. We can work on implementing similar functionality once everyone returns from the local holiday.
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I’m sorry for my shortsightedness - I use Yabe as my first ‘go-to’ to test for BACnet functionality and when the T3-TB didn’t reply with any downstream MSTP devices, I assumed that it wasn’t passing the WhoIs command or the Iam responses. When I use my Tridium Jace to query the BACnet devices on my network, the T3-NB shows up on my network, but not the two devices on its’ MSTP trunk. If I connect the trunk to my BASRT-B, the devices on my trunk show up, and I can map them into the Niagara database, as expected. Also, if I connect my trunk to the Jace’s Com port, the devices show up in a scan and I can map them in. They don’t discover at all when the trunk is only connected to the T3-TB and do discover in all of the other scenarios.
We will add some features to get the subnet devices to show up better using Jace and Yabe. Stand by for good news in a week or so. In the mean time you can still do some integrating using the bacnet instance and object ID. The data will get through.
