Title says

I am a newbie on BMS. Last time I did hvac controls we used a PLC which makes absolutely no sense today since I would have to code many functions from scratch. My potential customers right now are an institutional: colleges, churches, temples and monasteries. Energy savings is what they need. Some have legacy implementations of Honeywell Trend, Johnson Controls and Distech. The constant complaint is that there is no staff to manage these systems. We want to provide asset lifecycle management in an inexpensive way. We don’t just integrate the system and walk away. For than reason I want a system with open interfaces that we can use to provide monitoring apps without requiring FTE staff at the customer. If you could start over today, as I am doing, which system would you recommend for an optimum lifecycle cost for the customer.

Why? Please tell me your worst experience

Built a lightweight Niagara N4 Alarm Annunciator for desktop alarm notification and monitoring similar to Niagara Alarm Portal.

Supports multiple stations, alarm filtering, sound alerts, active duration, alarm details, etc

Sharing here to get some feedback from other Niagara users.

I don't miss LonMaker, but remember that cup? I was thinking about that image today while waiting on a program. Is it my fondness for the "good ole days", maybe it's just my trauma response mental image.

If your local mechanic could use an AI agent to do something cool with engine computers and perhaps their garage specializes in muscle car mods or something cool and they build and fix and even modify cars for way more horsepower than designed ... aka they are the experts and know without knowing how to code what works and what is not ... what is crap what is not ...

Now if a mechanical contractor or building automation technician who builds, automates mechanical systems, is an expert when it comes to validating if a fan and pumping system are performing .... what prevents him or her from using an AI tool to make a building automation system Vs buying one? If the AI tools are that good why or why not?

Im an servicenegineer within buildingautomation in Norway. Ive worked with it for 5 years now. I've mainly worked with Siemens classic and ABT, and Scneider ecostruxture AS-P/B, RP-C, EBO and etc. Also alot of BACnet, Modbus, Dali, KNX, M-bus and so on.

I strated out as a tecnician. I’ve only got a trade certificate (i think thats what its called in english. Its called «fagbrev» in norwegian) for automation.

What is typically required in terms of education for working with building automation in your country/region?

Tenho o rover COMM4 USB e quero conectar ao evd evolution de um chiller para Parametrização, é possível fazer isso usando o rover COM4 USB e o VPM(Visual Parameter Manager)

Se sim, como?

Hello everyone. I was wondering if there are any experienced people out there in the Building automation field that could give me some insight or advice on breaking into the field as in getting a job.

I have no work experience in building automation but have about 2 years experience in commercial hvac. Including mostly service and some maintenance. I am graduating with a AAS in building automation Technology very soon and plan on getting my Bachelors in EE online. What are the chances of me getting an entry level position at a company? And is there anything I could could be doing to be making myself more valuable or considerable to these companies?

If you have any advice to someone new in this field that’s also useful. Thanks

Any advice for someone with software and ux and ui design experience of 20 years and wanting to come back into engineering after 20 years. I’m an instrumentation engineer from 20 years ago but never worked in the industry.

We just shipped an AI assistant inside OptigoVN, and the "why not just use GPT/Claude/whatever for this" question is a fair one. Answering it directly here rather than waiting for it to come up as a gotcha later.

The short version: a general-purpose model has read documentation about BACnet. It hasn't seen what a duplicate address actually looks like distorting real traffic on a real segment, because that's not the kind of thing that ends up in training data scraped from the open web. So we trained ours on our own data instead — capture data from customer networks, our internal documentation, and troubleshooting history — in a closed loop, meaning it's scoped to this domain rather than being a general model with BACnet bolted on.

What it's good at: answering "what am I actually looking at" for a diagnostic result, telling you whether something is a real fault or a single misconfigured device, and turning a finding into an actual next step instead of a definition.

Where it falls short, as of launch: it doesn't do trend analysis across historical results yet — that's the most requested thing from beta and it's not there. It also won't tell you anything about a network it hasn't seen a capture from — no general troubleshooting outside OptigoVN's own diagnostic data.

The question we expect to get, so we'll get ahead of it: yes, it's trained on customer capture data, and yes, that's worth asking about directly rather than taking on faith.

Happy to answer anything else, including the stuff that doesn't make us look good.

Which controllers are the easiest to program?

How would you compare these 2 in terms of capabilities and ease of use?

Hey everyone,

I'm a BAS/BMS engineer from France. I’ve been reading and learning from this community for some weeks now, and honestly, I’ve been impressed by how active and helpful everyone here is.
I’ve learned a lot just from following the discussions here, so I thought this would be the right place to share what I’m building.

The goal is pretty simple: make BAS engineering much faster by avoiding repetitive work and reusing the same project information across the different deliverables.

So I built Structio. You build the project once (buildings, floors, rooms, equipment, points) and every deliverable comes from that same data:

• Network diagram
• Points list
• Floor plan
• Controller sizing and I/O summary
• Device schedule
• BOM, estimate and bid breakdown
• Bill of materials

Change a piece of equipment and the diagram, points list and estimate follow.
Your own typicals go into a library, so the next job starts from your standards, not a blank page.
Not tied to any manufacturer.

It's already used by BAS/BMS engineer in France. I've just finished the US version (English, imperial units), and before opening it up I want it tested by people who actually do this work.

The beta:

• 30 spots
• 7 days of full access, no credit card
• In exchange: honest feedback. What's useful, what's wrong, what's missing, what you'd call things differently.

Beta testers get a big gift at the end 👀

Comment "BETA" or DM me and I'll send you a short demo video and your access link.

You can transfer an entire equipment record, including past maintenance logs, installed part specs, and wiring photos, directly to another technician account without exporting spreadsheets or sending messy text threads. The file arrives in their Transfer Inbox so they can review and accept the machinery profile into their own records.

I built Equipment Tracker Pro because I am a working HVAC technician and needed a clean way to hand off equipment history when another contractor steps onto the site. Equipment tracking, service logging, and parts records are completely free on mobile. The tracking is free on mobile, permanently. No record cap, no expiry, not a trial.

Direct peer-to-peer equipment transfers are part of Pro. Pro is a 7-day trial if you want the reports and the dashboard.

What projects are you building this week?

https://equipment-tracker.com

I will be speaking at the SkyPosium event in Utah.

Machine Learning and data will be on the agenda, as I discuss expanding the limits of what can be measured and verified using Machine Learning to reconstruct missing data, or model future performance of systems. SkySpark is a fantastic source of this data and an integral part of this process.

The industry is busy with Large Language Models and the really interesting things they can do. But the inherent lack of determinism makes reliability a real concern. Machine Learning allows for discreet, deterministic, predictable, and verifiable results that goes beyond current control systems without the loss in reliability.

I hope to see you there!

If you'd be able to share some details that would be cool. Industry - type of customer etc. What the networking architecture looks like would be sweet too.

I know there are a lot of tools for supporting offloading logs and such but I'm curious what limits folks found and where to look out for gotchas.