Bachome BBMD

An extension of bachome, which adds BBMD support using natezimmer_bacstack. Currently only the homebridge thermostat is supported.

BACnet is a standard used for Building Automation Systems. There's a guide to it here: https://guides.smartbuildingsacademy.com/definitive-guide-bacnet

The hardware I wanted to get working in homebridge uses BBMD (BACnet Broadcast Management Device), which means a device on a regular IP network that facilitates routing to a separate BACnet network. To make it work, homebridge needs to know how to address BACnet addresses via the router. natezimmer-bacstack adds this capability to bacstack (the underlying BACnet service used by bachome).

To use BBMD here, you need to configure:

In bachome, target object specifications are string values, each 2 tokens separated by ":". The first value is shorthand for the object value type (see list below). The second is the object ID. Eg, "AV:16" means an AnalogValue object with ID 16.

If you don't know what values to configure, you'd need to explore your network with something like Cimetrics BACnet Explorer, for which there is a free version here: https://www.cimetrics.com/collections/bacnet/products/bacnet-explorer

The config schema has descriptions and sample values. These features should work, but not tested -

Configuring the plugin

This plugin supports visual configuration using the Homebridge Config UI X web interface.

If you want to create the configuration manually, you have to register the platform and accessories in your config.json file. An example may look like this:

{
    "platforms": [
        {
            "name": "BAChome BBMD",
            "thermostat": [
                {
                    "name": "Kitchen",
                    "manufacturer": "Caserage",
                    "model": "Caserage's thermostat",
                    "serial": "DEF"
                }
            ],
            "platform": "bachome-bbmd"
        }
    ]
}

Install Development Dependencies

Using a terminal, navigate to the project folder and run this command to install the development dependencies:

npm install

Build Plugin

TypeScript needs to be compiled into JavaScript before it can run. The following command will compile the contents of your src directory and put the resulting code into the dist folder.

npm run build

Link To Homebridge

Run this command so your global install of Homebridge can discover the plugin in your development environment:

npm link

You can now start Homebridge, use the -D flag so you can see debug log messages in your plugin:

homebridge -D

Watch For Changes and Build Automatically

If you want to have your code compile automatically as you make changes, and restart Homebridge automatically between changes you can run:

npm run watch

This will launch an instance of Homebridge in debug mode which will restart every time you make a change to the source code. It will the config stored in the default location under ~/.homebridge. You may need to stop other running instances of Homebridge while using this command to prevent conflicts. You can adjust the Homebridge startup command in the nodemon.json file.