When I started my business, I had to accept payment from my customers. Few realize how hard it is to get paid. Notice I didn’t said ‘make a product’, or even ‘market the product’, no: getting paid is hard.

Ever noticed that when you start working somewhere, they ask for your banking information? Want to work as an engineer? Good luck getting paid cash. It is assumed you have a bank account. You want to get paid where you work? How silly is that! It’s not as if you were going to work to get paid. Oh, wait…

This of course is just accepted as normal, because most people got their first bank account when they were very young, probably accompanied by their parents. In fact, let’s look at what the average Joe has done, banking wise:

• Asked for a bank account (sign many papers, personal IDs);
• Asked for a debit card (sign other papers, memorize PIN);
• Asked for a credit card (sign yet other papers, memorize PIN);
• Asked for checks (ok, nothing to sign here. Still a pain to write a check);
• Asked to open another account (papers…);
• Asked for web access (sign papers, create account, memorize password);
• Asked to register an account to trade stocks (sign papers, perhaps another password);
• Asked for a special retirement account (sign papers);

Then, when presented with an alternative, most people will only consider their current situation. “I can have something that is slightly better than my current situation? Meh…” (They would be wrong of course, it’s not just slightly better.)

It’s as if I had a magic machine that could teach me, in 10 seconds, the equivalent of a degree in my field. Then I would discard it as silly, because I have already studied it. Well, sure I have, but plenty of others didn’t!

Also, notice that for each step, you need to ask for something. You can’t do it yourself.

But what if you could be paid without having to deal with a bank? What if you could, with a single click, create a new account?

For the makers of this world, it’s also much more easy to work with bitcoins. Want to hack yourself a point-of-sale terminal in a few hours and try it live on your bank? Good luck with that…

How about building a casino in Minecraft? How would you hook that up with your bank?

And how about asking for tip? Now you simply have to leave your bitcoin address in a video description or a the bottom of an article and everyone can send you some bitcoins.

Bitcoin isn’t just perfect for the digital age, it’s also an environment where you can build and create things. HTTP isn’t great per se, but everything built with it gives us a rich world to explore. You can expect to have the same for the payment system. Bitcoin in itself isn’t great (it’s brilliant, but not great). It’s everything that will be built on top of it that will prove to be amazing.

This is why I’m a proponent of Bitcoin. Not for what it is now, but for what it will become. It just needs a little bit of love, and plenty of speculators!

Unless… you are talking about monetization. This is a process by which a commodity becomes money. Let me cite Konrad S. Graf, as he explains it in a better way than I ever could:

(…) In the case of a monetization event, though, the practical use-value of the trading unit (not only its price in terms of other goods or monies) actually does rise with the number of people using it and the depth of the market. To imagine how different this is from a classic asset bubble, it would be as if not only the price of bubble-era houses were rising, but also that their actual sought-after qualities as houses were improving spontaneously at the same time. Such houses might sprout new rooms with no one building them, with new paint jobs appearing mysteriously overnight without any painters having visited.

(I highly suggest you read the entire article; the insights are brilliant. Hyper-monetization: Questioning the “Bitcoin bubble” bubble.)

For money, the more the value rise, the better it is!

Let’s try to see it with a big company viewpoint. Would Amazon even consider to use Bitcoin if the entire market cap is less than its own cash flow? Of course not! So the first users are necessarily the small ones. They buy, use it, increase the price, and then the market cap can go to a billion. This in turns allow for medium enterprises to join the movement. They start accepting payments in the new currency and building infrastructure around it. This activity makes the currency more valuable and the price rises again… and again and again, in a self reinforcing feedback loop.

Let me repeat this again: for money, the higher the value, the better it is! Is there speculators trying to make a quick buck on Bitcoin’s back? Absolutely. Many of them don’t even understand how Bitcoin works. And yet, whether they want it or not, they increase Bitcoin’s market depth. They increase its value, making it more and more powerful. Each additional dollar in the price legitimizes Bitcoin, makes it more trustable and more acceptable.

At 0.10$, it was toy money. At 1$, a weird currency for anarchists and drug addicts. At 100$, it’s a worldwide experiment about money. At 1000$, it’s an obvious investment.

Even those who get Bitcoin don’t seem to realize that it’s much more than just a currency. It’s a distributed public ledger. It’s an environment onto which you can bootstrap more financial tools. This is so important. I don’t know how to stretch this enough.

For the first time in the history of mankind, force can’t be used to take wealth. How is that not the single most important evolution in all history?

Even if some people know you have 10 000 BTC, they can’t do anything about it. Sure they can torture you, but unless you give in, they have no way of getting to your wealth. Imagine that a government decides to take money directly from its citizens bank account (that would never happen, of course…). With Bitcoin, for the first time ever, they can’t.

You can transfer your bitcoins to anyone, anywhere in the world, without any 3rd party being able to stop or steal from you. Your wealth is now in your control.

Who cares? Bitcoin is here, it exists, it works and its resilient. Does it have all the necessary qualities to be a useful tool? Is it interesting for the wealth creators of this world? If so, your opinion really doesn’t matter. And that’s the beauty of it!

Oh, but of course, it’s a bubble!

The purpose of BACnet is to provide interoperability between devices from multiple manufacturers.

The idea is that if all devices speak the same language, no one will be ‘trapped’ with a proprietary protocol, forcing him to always buy at the same place.

This common language also have other advantages, such as making it easy to gather data and make advanced analysis. Simply checking the historical data plotted on a graph is enough to find and solve most problem.

However, despite all BACnet’s promises, the landscape is still mostly occupied by a handful of manufacturers.

In addition, BACnet is pitched as an ‘open protocol’, but the standards need to be ordered; even bacnet.org doesn’t provide a link to download the specs. This isn’t making it easy for newcomers. Want to see and try BACnet? Well, send us money and we’ll send you a boring pdf, and maybe, maybe you will stick with us.

For the developers, there’s some highly cryptic application that will provide some support, but for the newcomer that’s simply counterproductive to even try them.

This results in an horrible situations for the users. Building managers are often clueless as to what to do with a BACnet network. They don’t know what’s in it, nor do they know how to browse it. (Of course manufacturers will offer their own software… for a price.) There’s nothing wrong with selling software, but for such a basic need, browsing the network, a free software should be available. It’s like comparing Notepad and Word. Sure, sell Word, but the user should at least be able to write basic stuff in notepad.

Wacnet is a humble try to ameliorate the situation. By enabling an easy and almost instantaneous setup, anyone can at least see what’s on the network. Newcomers can explore the different properties and learn them.

 java -jar <filename>

 java -jar wacnet-0.1.1-BETA-standalone.jar

Let’s imagine a map with a Start location, and a Destination location. You know where you are, you know where you are going, but you have some important data missing: you don’t know how you will get there. Will the road be a straight line, or will there many detours?

Furthermore, you have to fill your gas tank before you start your journey and you won’t be able to fill it en route.

What’s the value of the dashboard’s fuel consumption under these circumstances? What is this ‘equation’ worth? Without the distance, it’s worthless.

You have to guess how much gas you’ll need. You can’t underestimate, because you will then be stranded in the middle of nowhere. So you have to make an educated guess, based on your past experience on the road. You will also add a little incertitude bias, just to be sure you will make it.

Thus, under normal circumstances, you will always have some gas remaining in your tank when you reach your destination. In addition, this gas will cost you more money upfront, and will add to the total vehicle weight, consequently making it burn more fuel. Physics’s a bitch.

It’s the same thing with any HVAC component. Suppose you need a boiler for a new school. What size should it be? Engineering firms can guesstimate, but they will also add a little extra, just to be sure. To a certain extend, you can control an oversized boiler to keep the temperature comfortable, but if the boiler is too small, no amount of control will allow you to reach your temperature setpoint.

As with the car, you need to overestimate. Unfortunately, a bigger boiler means an additional upfront cost. Bigger components also means higher operational costs.

All of this, of course, is the consequence of not having enough data! Without data, math equations are worthless.

It’s ALL about data. Let me make this clear: data data data data data.

Hopefully, building owners and engineering firms will tap into the torrent of data the BACnet protocol can offer them.

Building a new installation similar to another one? (Engineering firms love to copy-paste) Check the original installation! Boiler is cycling? Too big!

Same thing for renovation: You want to install a shiny new heat pump in an existing building? Well now you have data on a silver plate! Instead of guessing what is required, you can actually know it.

There you have it. Until the industry starts to seriously use the available data, HVAC systems will be oversized. Not because someone is lazy, but because without data, oversizing is a necessity!

Transferring heat from one place to another requires some work. The bigger the temperature difference between the two places, the more work it requires.

You could see it as moving dirt using a wheelbarrow. The temperature difference in this case would be the height difference. To take heat (wheelbarrow) from a cold place (low ground), you would have to push it to the hot place (high hill). The hotter the destination, the higher the hill.

Knowing this, to expand the least amount of energy possible, you would want to find the lowest possible hill to dump your dirt. In other words, you want your heat pump to work at a minimum temperature differential.

To accelerate heat transfer however, you must increase the temperature difference. The heat transfer is proportional to the temperature differential squared. This means that in order to keep a room warm in the cold months of winter, you might have to increase your heater set point to a higher temperature.

Let’s sum this up in those 2 following points:

1. For optimal efficiency, always seek the lowest temperature differential;
2. To increase heat transfer, you have to increase the temperature differential.

Thus, we can see that the optimal way to control a heat pump is to always try to use the lowest temperature differential, and only increase it when necessary to enable a bigger heat transfer.

If we were to follow this rule and to plot it compared to the exterior temperature, this is what we would get:

As you can see, the lower the exterior temperature, the higher the heat pump set point (to increase the heat exchange between the heat coils and the room air). But as soon as the exterior temperature rises, we lower the heat pump temperature set point.

Unfortunately, an optimal control is often supposed when salesman and engineers push for heat pumps, but is rarely applied once the machine is installed.

In the snowy french world of Québec, Canada, electricity is a province matter and is heavily subsidized. Even if ‘burning’ electricity directly to create heat is the dumbest way to use electricity, it’s often cheaper than to invest heavily in other solutions.

To patch this problem, the government created some ‘energy efficiency programs’. Geothermal energy and heat pumps can become a wise investment with these, but all estimates always assume an optimum heat pump control. And why shouldn’t they? If you buy a manual transmission car, everyone assumes you are going to shift gears when the time comes.

Alas, this is not the real world. Once installed, these systems are often tuned to ‘work’ and that’s it.

I’ve recently monitored a geothermal installation that reminded me of this cold hard fact. Here is what the heat pump set point looks like:

Does this looks like a mirror image? No, it looks like a single set point for every exterior temperature. If this set point is enough for the worse case exterior temperature (-30°C perhaps?), then it’s overkill for everything else. -20°C and still the same set point? You have a needlessly big temperature differential and are thus using the heat pump in a less efficient manner.

What does it mean? Plainly, money is wasted. Remember the manual car analogy? Here the car is always in the first gear, regardless of its speed. Will the car go forward? Sure! Will you burn more fuel? Yup!

The sad part of this is that everything is in place to use it efficiently. No need to buy or replace components. Only how this system is used should be changed. This could be rectified with some lines of code… Meanwhile, electricity is wasted and money lost.

Yet another reason why everyone with a BACnet network should do everything in their power to have historical data: to spot any easy-to-change costly behaviours.

I spent way too much time doing this video… at least for what I consider to be a so-so result. The next time I’ll try to jack up the audio a little, so that my voice is loud and clear.

I could also slack on the drawing board. The effect is nice, but boy is it time consuming! Each drawings must be accelerated ~8 times to have an interesting look. This means that if I want 2 minutes of doodling, I must do it for 16 minutes! That’s if I have everything right the first time (which I didn’t). Another downside of the drawings is to make sure the audio is in sync. Here again, that was quite long.

Next time I might give a try to screen capture. I have a tutorial to do… and as everyone who has written a tutorial before knows, nobody RTFM. A video might be what it takes to capture the attention.

How wonderful! You can tell the customer how easy it will be for him to switch to another company if you ever let him down! But will it be so easy? Besides the various BACnet variants that might be a compatibility problem, what could be a kick in the teeth? Let’s make a quick check list of what you need in order to perform a vendor transfer:

• Access to the controller I/Os? Yes;
• Access the trend logs? Yes;
• Access to alarms? Yes;
• Access to the programs? NO!

Wait what? So the user can access every I/Os in the building, but can’t change his system behaviour. So, besides monitoring, what can he do?

“Sure, you can reprogram your controllers, but you’ll need to use our closed source interface application in order to change anything in your programs. We will gladly let you buy one for the modest amount of <insert stupid locked-in price>$ and your soul for eternity.”

This, my friends, is a lock-in.

It is also the moral fight that the Free Software Foundation and the open source projects under the GNU licence are trying to win. You should not be a slave of your programs (nor should your clients).

Not only can’t the user change the programs, he is most likely to be unable to change the programs priorities. This means that even if the user were to try to do a tug of war with the existing controllers by adding a new one with a whole new program in it, the new commands could be completely ignored! If the old devices have higher priorities than your the new one, it’s game over!

The obvious solution (but less obvious to implement) is to have a language standard which could be read and edited by everyone. Obviously I would go for a lisp-like language, because I think it’s easier to grasp for the everyman. Anyone who have done primary school mathematics can understand how the parentheses are evaluated.

A language standard, while possible, is highly unlikely. The amount of work and cooperation between the many manufacturers would be non-trivial to say the least. In addition, if the program standard was ill-designed, it could drag down the entire BACnet standard with it.

There is however one little change in the standard that could help greatly. What if the programs were plain text and accessible through the BACnet network? Then every workstation would be able to at least open the program and let the user study it. Bonus point if they can also modify it.

The Program object type defines a standardized object whose properties represent the externally visible characteristics of an application program. In this context, an application program is an abstract representation of a process within a BACnet Device, which is executing a particular body of instructions that act upon a particular collection of data structures. The logic that is embodied in these instructions and the form and content of these data structures are local matters. – BACnet Standard 135-2004

Instead of making the content of the programs “local matters”, it could be a property, such as the description.

I can understand how, when the BACnet draft was elaborated, the controllers couldn’t have hold the plain text version of their programs, but today there’s no excuse.

Towards a truly open solution!