Blog
Legacy Field Guide No. 1 · 29 August 2026
A Brief History of Siemens Building Technologies (Integrator's Cut)
How Powers, Landis & Gyr, and Staefa became Siemens Building Technologies — and how to identify Apogee, Desigo, and Simatic gear on site and integrate each into Tridium Niagara.
Read moreVoice user interface for building management systems · 23 March 2017
An example of Amazon Alexa integration with Tridium Niagara
GUI is outdated. Welcome to VUI
Read moreCommunication services · 2 August 2016
Polling and Grouping
Polling mechanism described here and here does not have throughput big enough to ensure high update rate for big BMS installations. The next enhancement we will introduce is point grouping. The idea is simple: instead of getting points one-by-one, let’s request and receive multiple points at once. Naturally, every message will become bigger, but not proportionally bigger. Receiving two points...
Read moreCommunication services · 24 June 2016
Polling Going Deeper
The very basic polling service described in the first part has a limited throughput, so it is not well suited for real applications (except for very small ones) in its original form. Could it be enhanced? Of course. Divide and conquer Even a big system could be divided in small parts. Every part should have own master (router / gateway...
Read moreCommunication services · 17 June 2016
Polling Basics
All BMS communication protocols (well, almost all) use polling to read point values. This is a simple service, consisting of request-response message pairs. Master device (for example, Tridium Jace) asks for a point – slave device responds with its value. Repeat again, and again, and again. This service is present in Modbus, BACnet, Lonworks, Sauter novaNet, TAC Xenta, Satchwell NCP,...
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