Neptronic recently announced BTL certification of our BACnet products to version 14. This certification applies to all the EFCB, EVCB and TUCB series BACnet Application Specific Controllers (B-ASC). Some features and services were added in the testing phase to ensure compliance with BTL.

BACnet Testing Laboratories (BTL), which is part of BACnet International, provides users with assurance that a product has passed the industry standard BACnet conformance tests conducted by a recognized, independent testing organization. The BTL Mark logo is awarded to devices that pass a set of tests demonstrating compliance with the required functionality of a Device Profile and interoperability with other equipment that uses BACnet for communication. In short, these tests are designed to validate that the product correctly implements the specified set of BACnet features which includes encoding and decoding of the data, support of the correct properties for each object, support all of the required fields in services, physical communication parameters and most importantly the device’s ability to handle errors.

BTL, which has been performing product testing since 2001, ensures that our controllers offer seamless BACnet MS/TP communication for simple integration. This accelerates integration time and lowers project costs.

Over the years, Neptronic has added new functions and services to help simplify the integration process. Services are the means by which BACnet devices acquire information and command other devices. Here are some of the newly certified features;

BACnet Restore Service: This service enables firmware upgrades with the File & Program objects.

Weekly Schedule: A BACnet integrated schedule is now available on our controllers in order to configure up to six (6) events per day.

Subscribe COV Service: This is a useful tool to help reduce network traffic. Instead of repeatedly polling objects, which can reduce network speeds, a COV (Change Of Value) monitors an object and sends out a notice to inform that the object’s actual value has changed (predefined amount). A maximum of 10 COV subscriptions per controller are available.

Reinitialize Device Service: You may now remotely reset controllers via BACnet using the Reinitialize Device service. There are two (2) types of resets; warm and cold.

• Warm Reset acts as a restart of the controller with the actual configuration (cycles the power).
• Cold Reset restarts the controller with factory default configurations.

Priority Array Property: BACnet Priority Array Property type is described by the standard as a command prioritization mechanism and enables write commands to an output at different levels. The highest priority (lowest array index) has priority to any command written to a higher array index (Priority Array of 1 is more important than 16).

UTC Synchronization and Time Synchronization: These are two (2) ways to synchronize time in BACnet devices;

• Time Synchronization service will broadcast a request from a time master (client) device to adjust slave (server) devices' time and date with the master.
• UTC Synchronization service will broadcast a request from the time master device to adjust slave devices' time and date according to their own time zone.