ConnectivityWeek

On the road again... this week it is to the
ConnectivityWeek conference and and NIST's Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) meetings in Santa Clara, CA. It looks like an interesting week of Smart Grid and energy-efficiency sessions ahead (with a half-dozen or so intrepid BACneteers present). The SGIP has grown trememndously from the kickoff meeting last November, up from 400+ organizations to 528, and from 440 or so individuals (present) to 1600 members today.

Yesterday, the first day of the meeting, closed with a most memorable address from one of our members, Vint Cerf -- if the name is familiar, he's a father of the Internet. We learned much about designing systems to be flexible going forward, just the way the Internet Protocol became.

(And that 32-bit IPv4 address that's becoming a problem as address space runs out? Well, as he said, the underlying Internet as we know it was only an experiment -- one that never came to an end.)

Internal meeting

Away at meetings this week at our division headquarters in Minneapolis. First time I have spent any significant time here. Interesting to meet old (and newer) colleagues face-to-face for the first time.

Meeting's end

We wrapped up our week of meetings right at noon today, having reached a pretty impressive goal -- we cut through the backlog of change proposals!

Or at least those change proposals aimed at the BACnet standard itself. Dave Robin put the proposals aimed at the BACnet testing standard on the back burner -- in part because of the makeup of the voting membership we need to address those differently somehow. Our General Interest and especially our User voting members are not likely to care about the particulars of BACnet conformance tests, though the Manufacturer members definitely will!

For my part I was happy to see some of the residue of a decade-old debate over character sets swept away. Some of the issues might not be yet be finally settled but while researching the history of one of my old proposals I found two that were "on hold" that should now be put away, one listed as "accepted" (but after a public review it was replaced by something else), and I could advise the committee that the proposal that triggered the research could also be retired. They agreed, and it was done.

All in all, a successful meeting. And it left me with just enough mental energy after a long drive south to finish a draft of an article for the upcoming first issue of the BACnet International Journal, followed by this blog entry. Tomorrow I head for home.

Smart Grid in action?

Found on Internet:

Committee dinner

It's a very old tradition in the BACnet committee to go out one evening for a no-host dinner together, usually the night before the plenary session begins (spring and fall meetings), or the evening of the Saturday plenary (winter and summer). It's a good opportunity to leave the day's battles behind, to relax and chat.

But this time the plenary is running for a day and a half and our chairman decided to hold it the evening between the two days -- tonight. The committee recently began to complain about always returning to the India Palace in the spring meetings, even though the food is good, not expensive, and it's a bit of a quiet atmosphere. So last year we went somewhere else that was apparently pretty noisy (maybe being effectively deaf the whole time is why I don't remember it), so folks were really happy to return to the India Palace.

But I learned that it can be dangerous to hand your camera to another BACneteer. You never know what you're going to find on it afterwards...

Plowing on through

Busy day today as the plenary session got underway! Committee chair Dave Robin reversed the usual practice of starting with the involved proposals and pushing out the low-hanging fruit at the end. So today we started with the "easy" or quick proposals to reduce the size of the backlog of change proposals.

He led off with a VERY easy one I had drafted last year when a discussion on the BACNET-L mailing list last year revealed that the datatype of array element zero was nowhere defined in the standard! It was pretty obvious that it had to be Unsigned, and we don't think anyone has implemented it any other way, but such things are best not left to chance. So my proposal merely added, in the approriate place in the standard (Clause 12, p.129), the sentence "The datatype of array element 0 shall be Unsigned."

We polished off a number of relatively simple ones: Bernhard's examples of context-tagging with a context number greater than 14 (I posted earlier about BACnet tagging rules, but an example is a Very Good Thing to help implementers get it right.

We polished off one short, well-done but ultimately troublesome one ("What BACnet Is" was the title, I think) by referring it to the BACnet International and, at my request, the BIG-EU Marketing organizations. Thanks, David!

Then another of my proposals came up. I've already exercised my "taunting rights" reserved these past 13 years (so I won't name it), ever since the committee took a nice, clean little service I'd drafted for a specific purpose and festooned it with a lot of general application capability that nobody ever used. I admit that the new, further extensions I had reluctantly taken would have some useful application (albeit limited) -- but it appears nobody has ever used the service for anything but its original applications. So, that proposal is dead.

Another of mine came out of an observation by BIG-EU's Testing and Conformance Group that the Loop object's behavior when "out of service" was not as completely specified as, say, the Analog Output object. Cut, paste, edit and it was there. Passed. Note to my BIG-EU colleagues: Mission accomplished.

Frank's first proposal, to state the requirement for the DM-DDB-A BIBB (initiates "Who-Is") to be supported by BACnet Advanced Application Controllers because it is actually required, sailed on through with change or question. Good job, Frank!

Then we started getting into more potentially troublesome proposals.

Carl drafted one on the fly to strike the unused ReadPropertyConditional service. Rather than push this on towards a public review addendum we held it back for review in the summer meeting next month so that more folks will have an opportunity to weigh in on it. (Consider this fair warning.)

And there was more -- much more. We'll be back at it tomorrow morning for the last session of the meeting, ending at noon.

Bad humor

Over lunch today our small group had a few "ideas" for me. I've got the BAC Cave, now I need a BAC Car, with a signaling BAC Light, etc.

And I think it was Howard who suggested that the "BAC Man" already has his sidekick, current BACnet chairman Dave Robin. It took Carl a while to "get it," but perhaps he was still reeling from the cartoon that wound up on the meeting FTP server this morning, mixed in with all our meeting documents:

The picture is incorrect. Several of us got the word that today was "red shirt" day but Carl didn't. Or perhaps he was being contrary again. ( ;^)}

(Fortunately blogspot doesn't support audio, else I'd have to post the Honeywell Anthem also.)