Trane Tracer Questions

[johnlpatterson]

:anyone:

Wonder if you could help me find a contact to help me answer some fundamental Trane questions that I'm still pretty ignorant on; or at least someone who can point me in the right direction:

1. What functionality does the BCU provide (i.e. beyond basic scheduling)?

2. How different is Trane's implementation of BACnet from the latest specification? (Note: The third party Tridium Trane drivers are advertised at modified BACNet implementations to interoperate the Trane's BACNet).

3. How reliable are the BCU's? (Note: Read quite a bit in the forums that BCU's offer sparse gateway functionality as their default configuration because of limited resources. People who have tried to expose BACnet objects of sub-devices connected to the BCU have had to reboot the BCU around every two weeks due to it locking up from lack of resources.

4. Is the BCU key in configuring and troubleshooting faulty RTU's?

[shovelhead]

Hey,
The BCU will do most anything that any other front end controller will do.

The BCU isn't native BACnet, you have to make the point in the BCU. You have to create the AIs,AOs,DIs and DOs in the points manager but it's pretty easy to do. After that Tridium will discover them as named using the BACnet driver.

The BCU is pretty reliable, as good as the programmer anyway and as far as rebooting for the BACnet points I have never had to. The BCU has some information under under the status menu that tell you how loaded up it it is.

As for diagnostics, for the voyager or the precedent, it helps a lot for troubleshooting because the voyager doesn't have a display.

I use a comm4 driver for Tridium if the job only has comm4, if it has comm3 then for now I've been using the BCU.

[willf650]

Where have you been getting your com 4 driver? PM me the details if you would.

I've used one a couple times and it aint all its cracked up to be. I see mention of these drivers in several post and suspect they are all the same one from different sources. I would like to know if there are different ones out there and see if some perform better than others.

[scrooloose]

3. How reliable are the BCU's? (Note: Read quite a bit in the forums that BCU's offer sparse gateway functionality as their default configuration because of limited resources. People who have tried to expose BACnet objects of sub-devices connected to the BCU have had to reboot the BCU around every two weeks due to it locking up from lack of resources.

Its like any memory dependent device. You load it past its recommended level then its going to fail all day long. No different than a jace or computer. You can get a couple thousand points out of them, you just have to watch the cpu idle time/memory and if it gets to low then thats all you are going to get.