Innovative integration products

Co-author - Albert Putnam

In the 19th century Warren Seymour Johnson, an American college professor, got frustrated by his inability to regulate individual classroom temperatures. His multi-zone pneumatic control system solved the problem. It was a device that activated a light in the boiler room of the building if the temperature was low, indicating that janitors should shovel more coal into the furnace. Johnson’s system for temperature regulation was adopted worldwide for office buildings, schools, hospitals, and hotels – essentially any large building with multiple rooms that required temperature regulation. Thus building controls and automation were born. 

There are more than 15 building automation protocols in existence today. Sometimes, the buildings have several systems using these various protocols which need to communicate with each other. Routers and other integration products have been widely used by controls contractors and system integrators to allow this communication. The purchase mechanisms to obtain and install these integration products have remained mostly disruption free for the latest century -- and they are very very costly.

Cimetrics has been in the building controls and automation business for more than 20 years and knows most major protocols inside and out. We have experienced customers' struggles with the purchase and installation process. So we have a vision for disrupting the industry.

Our idea is to build and deliver the building automation integration hardware and software as hassle-free for the customers and resellers as possible.

Let’s look at the usual way that the customers obtain the integration products. To acquire any integration products and configure them in a traditional way requires extensive investments in both time and money. To add to the cost the local contractor who sells these integration products needs to maintain a skilled staff of people who can service the equipment, as well as provide training and setup.

The model Cimetrics provides is to have products with the easiest out-of-the-box setup and to sell direct to the customers or to resellers with one year tech support. The buying process looks like this:

Our hardware products have the same unified setup interface; so, if you have multiple Cimetrics products, they all look similar when you login to them. To configure them you need to know just several things. For example : to setup our B6030 BACnet/IP to Modbus router the customer needs to know only three things – Modbus baud rate, Modbus ID and IP address. All the complicated mapping and templates are in the box behind the scenes – a customer doesn’t need to figure that out. 

Here is a Youtube video with a configuration example.

Another example is the BACnet/IP to MS/TP router - B6000. Again, for a successful configuration you need to know just a few things: MS/TP baud rate, IP address, and MS/TP network setting.

The local contractor can resell these products without going thru costly and intensive training from the manufacturer (us). The setup is so uncomplicated that can be learned very easily without any paid training.

We are constantly improving our integration products and our end goal is to have auto-configured plug-and-play products. We are contributing to a movement forward, rather than adding friction and moving against. Join our movement to use more easily configurable, cheaper, and more reliable direct-to-consumer integration products.

Also in Cimetrics News