A Tale of Two Conferences, or what's new in BACnet

Late last week I received calls for help from two folks speaking at conferences in Asia and Europe, both of which start tomorrow. Neither speaker is (currently) active with the BACnet committee but they needed to know what's been added to BACnet lately, what's going on today, and what's coming down the pike. For a short summary of major new additions to BACnet:

Addendum 135-2008j Physical Access Control. This addendum, along with Addendum 135-2004f (Access Door object), adds extensions to support physical access control in BACnet.

Addendum 135-2008k Adding UTF-8, an international character set. The Web and XML have helped foster the use of UTF-8 as a single character set that supports all languages.

Addendum 135-2008l New BACnet Workstations. This addendum adds the Operator Display profile (B-OD) and the Advanced Workstation (B-AWS) to the existing Operator Workstation profile (B-OWS) in BACnet.

These addenda and other "minor" additions may be downloaded from ASHRAE.