General Purpose Sensors (306)

Note that this is an unfinished article.

General Purpose Sensors are any type of sensor that is not an occupancy or light sensor.   They conform to the IEC62386-306 standard.  We commonly refer to these devices as "306 Sensors".

More information on the types of devices here:

https://www.dali-alliance.org/dali/standards.html

There are 64 control devices permitted per Dali bus, each of which can have up to 32 instances.  Therefore, there are 2048 possible instances that could exist, but typically, there would rarely be such an amount.  zencontrol controllers currently support interacting with up to 300 concurrent general purpose sensors.  We manufacture a Multisensor that produces 11 general purpose sensor instances and a standard light sensor / occupancy and pushbutton instance that has an IR receiver connected to it.

Any modbus device that you connect to is exposed in our system as an emulated 306 sensor.  Essentially, we handle communication with the modbus device and produce a dali device with 306 sensor instances to account for the modbus registers you are tracking.  More information about this can be see in the modbus document.

Getting Started

You can find your General Purpose Sensors in Instances Types -> General Purpose Sensor

As is usual, you typically configure your sensor to function in each profile.   You can give the sensor a target and send its value to system variables, etc.

Behaviour 

Ensure that your sensor instances have a configured behaviour for each profile that you wish to run in.

Input and alarm Triggers - Values sent to targets (eg system variables) and alarms are triggered.  No data sent to cloud.

Input and alarm trigger with analytics - All of the above, with additional feature of data sent to the cloud (must have 306 data license)

Input and alarm analytics - Values sent to targets and alarm analytics pushed, also.

Retrieval Method 

Hysteresis - The default method - the device will update the controller when the sensor value changes above a percentage change.  For example, at the default value of 5, a sensor reading that changes by 5% from the last report will cause a new value.  

Poll Time - The controller will accept hysteresis based changes, but also poll the sensor value, once per retrieval time.  

Report Time - A further option to inform the sensor itself to periodically report.  Note that this does not yet have an editable value for the time so should not be used.

Live Data

If you have live 306 sensor data licensed, you should see the current values from the sensor being streamed to the page

Implementation over BACnet

There are two requirements for general purpose sensors over BACnet

You must be licensed for BACnet Inputs and running the associated firmware variant

You must be licensed for live 306 sensor analytics

BACnet PICs documents are found here:

https://support.zencontrol.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001280792-Do-you-have-a-BACnet-list-of-points-PICS-document

Each existing general purpose sensor is exposed over BACnet as an Analog Value at point number 2048-4095 (ie, 64 control devices with 32 instances).  Only devices that exist and are configured to function will be exposed as points.  

The point number is derived by the control device address and instance number of the device.   

Points (2048-2079) represent control device address 0, instance 0-31

Points (2080-2111) represent control device address 1, instance 0-31

This is the most "fixed" address we can apply to the device - though naturally, you can modify the point number by modifying the control device address of a device.   This saves large amounts of ram on the control system but has the downfall of meaning that it is possible to have points out of order whilst you discover points.  

Control Device Addresses can found in Instance Types -> ECD view

Instance number is generally, the third value in the ID of an instance (controller id.device id.instance number).  Note that it is possible to change the change any of the ids so in some cases, you may discover that your numbers do not correspond to instance numbers.

The name field of each BACnet point is packed with as much information as possible to assist with point identification.

The schema for this is Fitting Number | CD Address | Instance Number | Primary Target 

An example of points being out of order due to control device address / fragmentation from enabling the instances at different times

The unit field is populated where we can convert the dali 306 sensor to a BACnet unit.  If there is no conversion unit available, we have had to leave as (95 - No units).