This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito episode 458. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode 458 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. This is the first episode in this series where we are going to be teaching building automation. Assuming that you have a new employee, they know nothing about building automation, they need to get up to speed, at least conversational and building automation. This is going to be a series for you.
I'm going to actually create its own playlist on YouTube. And the series is going to start with just basic fundamentals. If you watched our podcast on Monday, where I talked about mentoring and I talked about the three tiers, you know, mechanical electrical it, we're going to spend quite a bit of time on that. We're also going to spend time on building automation. Use a lot of examples, use the whiteboard, just fun stuff like that. This will be every Wednesday at 10am Arizona time
that will be live. So if you want to interact ask questions, make comments. That will be the time to do it. Arizona time right now is Pacific timezone. It will be mountain timezone after daylight savings. Now, what to expect in this first off, if you're listening to this on the podcast, go to podcast smart buildings academy.com, forward slash 458. That's where the recording will be. Probably this time tomorrow, because I
have to travel down in Phoenix after I finish this episode. I will say I welcome any comments, any engagement, any questions, anything that's not clear, please ask the more engagement the better. Feel free to plan around this, have your team sit down and watch these, you'll be notified if for example, we're not able to have a live session. I will say if you're watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing hit the subscribe
button hit the notification bell head on. If you're watching this on LinkedIn or Facebook, please consider hitting the Share button and sharing this with your network. And if you're watching or listening to this on Spotify, or Apple podcasts, consider giving us a five star review if you feel like we've learned it. Alright, so let's dive in. And the first thing we're going to start with is a diagram. I believe I got this off of Northland controls website, if I remember
correctly. It's a super high level diagram. But it provides a really good understanding of what I call a four tier architecture. In this case, it's a three tier architecture. I do want to say. smart buildings Academy is a vendor agnostic training provider, we train on all sorts of different products. And we do not have any one single product that we recommend. That's for the world of owners and contractors, we
simply train people on how to actually do this stuff. Alright, so when you're thinking of building automation, let's imagine you are brand new and you know, absolutely nothing. What does it all mean? What does this term building automation systems or building automation management or BMS Building Energy Management, BMS building management systems? There's a variety of different acronyms. What do they all mean? Well, in a nutshell, this is what I like to tell people. When people ask
Phil, what do you do? And what I tell people is, are you familiar with a nest thermostat? And they'll be like, Yeah, I know what a nest thermostat is. And I say, Well, imagine a nest thermostat, but expand that for something the size of a hospital or an airport. I, my company, teaches people how to install program design, cell service and project manage those kinds of systems. Well, if you talk about a building automation system, and you're completely brand new building automation system, we
have to go back kind of circa 1970 1980s. To really understand back before then, there was building automation. It was primarily electromechanical analog systems. We'll talk more about those in a future lesson. But what these systems did was essentially took inputs made some sort of process decision whether that was through circuitry, whether that was through in the case of pneumatics, like accumulators, solenoids, etc. Made some sort of decision to then drive an
output. Still, to this day, even with the most advanced building automation systems. At the end of the day, everything is about you get some data in the form of an input, whether that is a physical sensor, or that is some sort of logical input, where you use a lot of terms I'm gonna, by the way, how I teach, just so you know, I tend to throw out a lot of terms, and then in later lessons, we're going to go and actually revisit those terms.
goal in doing that is not to frustrate you. But really to just get you familiar with hearing the term repetitively if you watched once again, Monday's episode and I talked about Bloom's Taxonomy, and I talked about the different levels of learning, then you would have known that just hearing the Word and understanding what the word means is critical before you can ever apply whatever the concept is. And before you can ever
actually design and implement things with that concept. So backing up, building automation, at its simplest level, is a series of inputs and outputs. So I'm gonna hide this, and I'm going to show this, this, I believe, is from computational. So a series of inputs like this wall sensor being an input going into this controller, which then is going to drive an output. And let me hide this and bring up this. So this is from building automation solutions. This is a controller diagram, we can see
even more that now. And I'm gonna just build, bring up this image, here we go. You can see, I've got my inputs, right, and they're coming into my controller, and then they are driving my outputs later in this series, probably a couple of weeks from now we're going to start to look at different input types, different output types, we're going to talk about different control schemes, etc. But suffice to say right now building automation, you go to a piece of mechanical equipment.
So if you live in America, and you have been in a building, you've experienced air conditioning in some way, shape, or form. So think of an air conditioning unit, in this case, a air handling unit, it handles the air, it distributes there, throughout the building, this controller, this device would go in a panel, electrical panel, somewhere near this piece of equipment, and would process data from these inputs into the controller, the controller would most likely have some sort of
programming in it. And then that programming would drive the outputs. Now there would most likely be set points in here. So set points are not a physical input, they're a logical input. What does that mean? So if you're driving your car, and you're using cruise control, your physical input is your foot on the pedal, as you push that that accelerates the car. And as you accelerate the car that then drives the engine to produce more rotations, which creates more expansion, guess and all
that stuff and causes acceleration? Well, in building automation controls, as in most things in life, it's not too dissimilar. You we have inputs, which you know, an input may be a temperature, and we want to drive that temperature, maybe it's a space temperature, we want to drive it to a certain setpoint. So very much akin to the car example, you're pushing your foot on the pedal, you are trying to hit a specific miles per hour, or kilometers per hour if you're in Europe or somewhere
else, and you want to go and hit that. But you don't want to sit there and maintain that all the time. And maybe you want to foot off the gas. Well, in order to do that we have cruise control, this is a logical input on some cars, you can actually set the miles per hour on other cars, you just get to where you want you set and it locks it in that would be very similar to a latch in building automation controls. So we set that set point, but
that is a logical setpoint. And that setpoint. And that input, they come together in some sort of process that we'll talk about in a future lesson to then drive an output in this case, it is the engine. In the case of a temperature and a temperature setpoint. It may be a valve it may be a damper, there's a variety of things that may be. Alright, so if we go back to our architectures, so if I hide this, and I bring us back to our architecture, we're gonna start to move our way up our
architecture. But it's very important that you understand that our controllers have inputs and outputs. From here, this is all well and good. But we have a problem, or at least we had a problem back in the 1980s 1990s and early 2000s. And that
problem was visualization what I mean by visualization. It's all well and good if you have one air handler and that's all you have to do with one air handler you could simply put a pneumatic system in there you could set some dials and some gauges key simulators, solenoids, etc. And you could essentially operate these systems by hand, literally operate them with your hands. That's where the term
running things in hand comes from. All right, so the thing is, is that you have a hospital, it has 50, air handling units, 1000 Vav, boxes for chillers, etc, I'm just throwing things out there. And the thing is, is that you've got all this going on, there's no way you can operate it at hand, sorry, I gotta take my watch off, for some reason my phone is blowing up. And there we go. Take that off, because that is bugging the
crap out of me and distracting me from this episode. Alright, so as I was saying, we have all of these systems, these building automation controllers, or in the case of pneumatics pneumatics, or in the case of electromechanical systems those,
well, we have no way to visualize them. So if someone wanted to control all of the patient rooms in a hospital to 72 degrees, because you want satisfied patients, because if you don't have satisfied patients, they complain on their different exit and feedback forms, especially if you're taking Medicare, Medicaid, you don't get good patient set scores, you don't get your full reimbursement, and that affects your profitability at hospital. So that's a bad thing. But how
do you visualize this? Well, there in lies the supervisory device. Now I do recognize, and I will do my best, but honestly, I'm probably going to fail at this. So just give me some grace, I will do my best to try to rotate between different terms like supervisory device gateway router, I came up in the world where it was always called a supervisory device. I know that other people in certain products use the term router.
And I know that other folks use the term gateway, for simplicity sake, any device that takes multiple building automation field controllers, and connects them to the visualization software, which we have yet to describe via either a field bus or a network bus, to my perspective is going to be called a supervisory device. Feel free to call it a router to yourself or call it a gateway, you are not wrong, it is just a
different set of terms. But what happened kind of circa 1990s, circa 2000, circa 1990, for sure, we started to see these supervisory devices put in these field controllers, right, we moved away from pneumatics and electromechanical control. Like I said, we haven't covered these, but we'll cover them in a future lesson. And we move to what's called direct digital controls. So here's a couple of concepts that I've throw at you. And we'll cover in a future lesson in electrical, the
concepts are going to be analog, and digital. So you've probably, maybe you have maybe you haven't, you've probably heard of a sine wave. A sine wave is a analog signal. Well, our temperature sensors are resistive, meaning that they have multiple different readings depending on the temperature. So resistance is measured in ohms. We'll talk about that in ohms law in a future lesson, I feel like I'm saying future lesson if it were a drinking game saying the word future lesson, I would
probably have killed people by now. So I understand I'm using that term a lot. Bear with me, I promise you, we will go through those in future videos. But like I was saying, with our inputs, we have analog inputs. And these analog inputs, they're great, they're amazing. It gives you a lot of range of which you can sense pressure, temperature, flow, etc. The big problem is a computer does not know what to do with analog signals, it doesn't know what to do with them computer processes, ones
and zeros or digital signals. So then came the direct digital control controllers. These controllers had analog to digital converters that enabled us to take analog signals and convert them to digital signals. And thus the DDC controller was born and what ultimately would become the building automation system was started with DDC controllers now we could program the controller at first it was just programming with DIP switches something called application specific
controllers. But eventually we got to freely programmable could trollers where you could plug in with a laptop, and you could program that device or you could program through a supervisory device using line code. Once the program was in there, though, that's all well and good. But we needed a way to get the data from the field controller to some form of graphical interface that the building automation operator could utilize, or the
technician could utilize. Enter the supervisory device, you have kind of two trunks, you have field buses, and you have network buses, that's for a future lesson. But field buses suffice to say, to wire buses that would go from device to device in what was called a daisy chain, it was just a chain
of devices that would then go to the supervisory device. And the supervisory device would supervise that field network, it would collect data from using a variety of different vendor specific at the time protocols, and would take that information, put it in the supervisory device, and then using a direct connection to a computer would go and populate a screen with
data and then you could go in interface. So we have then went from the field level, utilizing the direct digital controls over the field bus to the supervisory slash gateway slash router slash whatever you want to call it to the building automation server, and the at the time what was called the thick client More on that in the IT lesson. This thick client enabled the operator to go and change set points, create schedules, do all sorts of things, see the data on the building automation
controller. And at the end of the day, it really changed things, kind of circa 2000, we started to move to web based systems. Because what would have to happen is these supervisory devices were physically connected to a desktop machine. And you would physically have to be in front of that desktop machine in order to interface with them. That becomes a problem when you're on a campus and you need to be able to interface and maybe you're in a different part of the building
or a different building entirely. Then we got web based systems, which basically are still a server but they serve up a website kind of feature. And you're able to connect to the website web browser, and still navigate to your building automation software. That is, in a nutshell, the building automation architecture. Now I'm going to move into some specifics around building automation graphics, we're going to talk about one lines, we're talking about how this all comes
together. And then we're going to take a look at a Niagra system Niagra being a type of system that is heavily utilized in our industry. And by the way, folks, if at any time you got any questions, please do not hesitate to let me know I'm gonna take some water real quick. All right. So if I hide this on our screen, and I go here to nope, that's not what I want to show. I want to show where did you go. So it talks about visualization, this image is from Jade logic.
Visualization is it was the big game changer. And it enabled the operator to be able to visualize our buildings and what they were doing. So what you can see here is this is a graphic, it's a
representation of a air handler. It represents both actual logical points like occupancy set points, etc. and physical points, like the supplier temperature, return, air temperature, etc. Having this now enabled the operator to see and control and monitor through things like point extensions of alarms, histories, trends, accumulators, etc. What was going on in the building, this really helped because now you could have one person that could be doing the job of many and
properly configured these systems enabled you to really dial in your building environmental conditions report on them. For example, if you're in healthcare, and you have a joint commission visit, because someone had an infectious event during surgery, and they're trying to litigate, you can now go to your history of temperatures and show that you were in the proper environmental conditions for air changes
temperatures and humidities. And that that environmental conditions were at least not a cause of the infectious event. Let's move on and take a look at a slightly different graphic. This is just another version. This is a delta system. So I'm trying to give you multiple different looks of multiple different systems. But you can see very Very similar, right. Whereas that was a system specific graphic, this is more of a higher level system. So that was a single air handling
unit. This is a look at a central utility plant, both a hot water as well as chilled water plant. And we can kind of see a bunch of different capabilities and properties right here. So all of this comes together to enable the operator or the technician to be able to automate the building. And its associated systems, hence building automation system. Now,
there's a lot here, right? You see graphics, these are things that are configured by the technician, we have points, we have programs, we have inputs and outputs, we have controllers, we have network architectures, all of these terms and things we're looking at today are things that we'll be looking at as we move through the cert series on building automation. We're going to hide this real quick, and I'm going to switch over here to Niagara. We're going to look at a semi
live system. I say semi live because this device is actually hosted on my computer here. So it is not a live device per se, but we will be looking at live devices as we move through the series. But what we can see here is got a couple different things going on. This is the graphical user interface. All of this is the graphical user interface for the building automation
software. Niagra, like I said, is one form of software. And what you'll see kind of breakout in building automation systems is you will have some manufacturers that use multiple tools and some manufacturers that use single tools in order to configure their building automation systems. And you'll also see some manufacturers that have a single tool for both configuration and visualization. This is what is known as a thick client. Because I have to have this installed on my machine.
I'm not connecting via the web. And what this tool here allows me to do. It allows me to do things like programming. This is one form of programming. This is known as block programming or graphical programming. There's another form of programming known as line code programming, and line code. Very simply, it is text based programming. You will also see things like networks, I mentioned, we have networks. We also have the capabilities to go in and set up things like point extensions. So
I can go to a physical point. And I can go and drop a point extension on to the point. And that point extension in extends the capabilities of the points. I know you don't know what points are yet. I know you don't know what extensions are yet. That's okay. Like I said, we'll cover it in a future lesson. But in a nutshell, this is building automation. I haven't talked about how these systems are designed. I haven't talked about how they're specified. I haven't even talked about how you know
what you're installing what you have. That's all for a future lesson. But this should give you a high level overview of what a building automation system is, why we use them. And some of the terminology. All pause the video right now. And I won't pause it because I'm live. But I'll stop sharing my screen. And we'll take some time to answer any questions that you all may have as part of this lesson. I welcome your questions. And
yeah, we'll see what you got. An Andrew, it's good to see you. I see you in the YouTube chat. But I will tell you, the good news is if you're brand brand new to this, once you get the terminology down and you get the architecture down here's the really cool secret to smart buildings in general. Every system and I would love someone to show me a system that I can't find one that matches this. So
this is an welcome opportunity to prove me wrong. But every system, access control, video surveillance, lighting, AV building automation, they all follow in some way shape or form at least a three tier architecture server supervisory device field controller. So for example lighting you'll have a lighting server, right and then you will have controls at the ballasts level, you will have a actual panel that distributes.
It may be an electrical supervisor. But it exists to consolidate all of those light fixtures, and then bring that data up to the lighting server. So once you learn this three tier architecture, and you learn these core concepts you're going to learn in this series like inputs, outputs, different system functionality, basics of electricity, etc, you'll be able to take that to any other system, you'll be able to take
that to access control. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to learn the software, you'll still have to learn basic things. But yeah, in a nutshell, that's where it all comes in. So Andrew asks, Where does AI fit in? That's a whole nother topic. But I'll give you kind of a very high level answer to that real quickly. So, AI is an often misunderstood topic. There is
multiple forms of AI. There's machine learning, there's neural networks, there's large language models, I mean, everyone's kind of super excited about AI right now and chat GPT and things like that. Those are large language models, they're meant to predictively respond based on a large data set of data. Then you have things that like neural networks that are meant to simulate the brain, you have things you can argue that AI, artificial intelligence is anything that augments the
intelligence of the operator. Some folks may call that augmented intelligence that's neither here nor there. But simply something that looks for predictive patterns, and analyzes and reports. So analytics, things like assistive design software, I think that's where we're actually going to
see what people deem as, like Game Changing AI. First is things that help you write programs, things that use optical character recognition, to scan specifications, and then help you design graphics or design systems, I think we'll see that first. That's why I quite frankly, I think the programmer and designer roles are going to go, if we're talking about what things are gonna get automated first, in our industry, I think the programming and designer roles
are gonna get all automated first. And then I think, in the who knows, near far, I don't know, if I knew that I would be making investment choices, not running a training business. But somewhere in the future, you're gonna have robots or something that no one's even imagined that can do hands on technical labor.
I just don't know at which point that's going to happen. So yeah, hopefully that answers your question, what other questions do you all have, I hope you're as excited about the series as I am, we're going to first start with looking at each layer of the building automation system inputs, and outputs and controllers, then fieldbuses, then supervisory devices, and then graphics and all that fun stuff. Here's how this is gonna work. Just so you know, I obviously run a training
business. I obviously am not a nonprofit. So what we will teach you in this is we will teach you the what, but if you're looking to learn the how that's what our business specializes on, we teach people how to do things, but we will definitely teach you the what what are things? What do they do, how do they work, things like that. But the actually, how do I go wire things up? How do I implement things, that's where our
business really shines. It's something that our instructing staff is really good at has great track record of success. So being fully transparent. That's kind of our business model. I hope that you all will find this extremely valuable, and you'll consider exploring our training services. But if not, at least, you'll get that kind of very baseline level of understanding all of these terms, concepts, and ideas that I don't see anyone else really sharing information about,
unfortunately. Okay, everybody, I appreciate your time here. I'll give you all a couple seconds to see if anyone else has any questions potentially. I'll check the regular places. So like I said, next week, we will be starting on inputs, we'll look at physical inputs, we'll talk about the different types of physical inputs and some of the core concepts around
those I appreciate all of you being here, I really do. The best way you can support this, besides for going to smart buildings academy.com and checking out our solutions and our offerings, along with our free skill assessment is to subscribe to the YouTube hit the notification bell that shares this with more people, especially when you hit like LinkedIn, Facebook, go and share this with your connections just hit the share button. Apple, podcast Spotify, just give us a
five star review if you feel we've earned it. Thank you everybody. Monday is going to be continuing our business series. So if you're a business owner, we are going to be continuing that and Wednesdays is going to be this technical series. If you all are going to be at Niagara summit, I hope to see you there. I will be there along with my team. Otherwise, I will see you all next Monday on the podcast. Thanks so much everybody, and I hope you have an awesome day. Take care