I attended the BACnet Committee and working group meetings in November, 2009, in Atlanta, Georgia. During the MS/TP working group meeting, it was disclosed that KMC had applied for a patent which invents automatic MAC addressing for MS/TP devices. It was surprising and disappointing to me, since the BACnet MS/TP working group had been working on standardizing several mechanisms to allow automatic MAC addressing since early 2008.
Hi Steve,
I recently received an American Standard Air Conditioning AccuLink system and have become interested / motivated to better understand the protocol. Can you point me in the right direction? It’s a two wire interface. Ideally, I could envision an ARM based micro-controller communicating with the thermostat,.
Best Regards,
Brent
Hi Brent,
Not sure what protocol the AccuLink system is using. If it is using BACnet – I can help. Otherwise – you might have good luck calling American Standard and talking to one of their engineers who knows their protocols.
Best Regards,
Steve
Companies obtain patents for a variety of reasons, and I don’t know why KMC decided to apply for this particular patent. If the BACnet committee is serious about standardizing an automatic address assignment mechanism for MS/TP, then the BACnet committee should discuss possible licensing terms for this patent with KMC. We should not assume that the patent was obtained in order to impede the development of a standard mechanism.
Thanks for the encouragement, Jim!