Optigo Networks had the pleasure of travelling to Las Vegas, Nevada last week, for the world’s largest heating, refrigeration, and air conditioning conference: AHR Expo. At the Expo, we launched our new product integration with Contemporary Controls, showcased Optigo Connect’s latest features, presented on measuring the health of BACnet systems with Visual BACnet, and welcomed our newest team member, Ryan Hughson previously...

Getting visibility into all levels of your BAS system including your MS/TP networks is crucial for proper troubleshooting of BACnet systems 

When your MS/TP network breaks down and you have to capture data for diagnosis, you’d better hope you’re in the building. Otherwise, it means driving to site for the lengthy process of locating the router in question, using your USB dongle to capture the network data you need, and then sorting through the packets in Wireshark to untangle the issue.

MS/TP networks are complex to set up, and it's even more challenging to know if they are running efficiently. This is why Visual BACnet has three diagnostic checks for MS/TP traffic.

At the end of September, Optigo’s VP Product Management, Dan Ronald, and Software Engineer, Daniel Tan, took Visual BACnet to BACnet PlugFest at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH. They spent three days working with engineers, developers and experts from major BACnet device manufacturers to test their products and ensure interoperability.  

We often have people ask us how to create a packet capture, or pcap file, to use in Visual BACnet. While any pcap should give you some insight into your network, there are some best practices that vary depending on what you are trying to discover.

Global Who-Is requests are important to ensure all of the devices on your system are accounted for. However, if they occur too often they can clog the system with all of the I-Am replies. It is important to know if they are being sent out too frequently.