AutomatedBuildings.com Review - Haystack Connect Review

Great job by the Haystack community in organizing a feel good event. The event had more than 50% of attendees under 40, that was amazing. This will help the Haystack movement grow faster than anything else we can do. They also created a new word "Haystackable". Good fun was had by all and you could feel the revolution in the air.

The complete conference is now online with linkage to pdf of most presentations on the right hand bottom of each interactive session page served off the PointView menu. Conference Agenda and Session Details below formated by PointView.

For a great video and commentary of event go to http://controltrends.org/. Eric and Ken did an amazing job of exposing with video interviews the people who made this event work.

ControlTalk Now Live at Haystack Connect Haystack Connect as it resumed its mission to adroitly usher in the world of self-defining data — in a collaborative way that no single-minded entity could possibly achieve. Marc Petock and three special guests, Brian Frank, Anno Scholten, and Richard McElhinney join ControlTrends for a pre-reception discussion of why some 240 of the top global automation and IoT professionals are attending the second Haystack Connect meeting, and what the continued growth and success of Project Haystack represents for the future of building data.

Christopher Naismith of SES Consulting and I after our session ATTRACTING SELF-LEARNING ASSETS met with several folks to discuss self learning companies and we learned lots. An eye opener for me and the other over 40 folks was:

Millennium folks by definition are self learners. We simply need to define what they need to learn. We also need to explore how to best digitalize the thoughts of the boomer's and connect to today's flavor of the day social media. Our discussions found a few folks using "slack" as an internal communication tool. Christopher has started a group on slack... call Hayslack......too cute right? Let Chris know if you want in and we will get you an invite. christopher@sesconsulting.com Most folks in the group to date, are consultants trying to make sense of all this stuff.

Be sure to join the haystackconnect LinkedIn Group to be part of Connecting Companies, Communities and People who are redefining Smart and Connected Systems. Smart Devices. Smart Buildings. Smart Business.

The "betweeners", those folks between millenials and the baby boomer's are the connection piece I have been looking for to provide the connection of the millenial folks to the baby boomer's now leaving the industry. They have an amazing talent to be able to talk with trust to all generations.

Track 2-Session 1: Next Gen Hardware I liked this thought from session's discussions, Cellphone industry has sold every one in the world at least one cell phone now they want to do it again for each M2M & IoT device. Imagine the numbers. Intel jumped in to discussion to advise that they are as much as possible pushing functionality into a chip level. It was a mind expanding discussion to grasp texting and having social media discussions with our field sensing and metering devices and again proved that Haystack naming is imperative.

New generation hardware will move data to the field from the cloud. This is a new concept using cheap memory like those used for cameras will allow field devices to store more information than ever possible before. Field hardware will have faster communication speed 5 Gigabyte plus, and will be designed as big data at the edge devices. This is a big heads up and head shake for big data in the future as data will become an integral part of sensing and control.

1. Next generation devices will have more memory, lots more memory, moving big data to the edge and storing it there in raw format for use as required. Devices will store their own data for deeper understand by all.

2. These next generation devices will have greater network speeds to allow big data to be polled from the edge. This seems to be the best devices to bring forward legacy devices. Example Contemporary Controls' new product, review power point to understand this evolution. Original control systems were not data gathering systems memory and communication speeds were not an issue. Cost of memory and network speed has dropped drastically.

3. Next Next gen - 2 to 3 years will see cell phone like devices with gps, camera, at the edge of big data using smart phone evolving power and wireless networks such as NFC, blue tooth to wireless gather data this will allow the integration of people information and connection of devices to social media. Machine to machine will talk and text and advise us of how they are doing or if the need help via social media smile it will be a new world 4 sure. This is where thinking needs to be for systems moving forward and future proof

How will traditional control companies deal with this? They need to grow quickly embracing these concepts to be leaders not followers.

Haystack code is easy to understand and can be read by machines take the time to watch
Brian Franks presentation

Rob Johnson's presentation summarizes the state of the BACnet Extended Data Model (XD) concept. BACnet XD is a significant step forward for BACnet, incorporating tagging and referencing concepts, and allows incorporation of multiple tagging dictionaries.

If you were there you know you need to be back in two years at the next Haystack Connect Event. If you were not you need to learn more about his exciting movement. The need is clear and we all need to ask those non believers; "How do you propose to manage big data tagging?" With the rapidly evolving trend of the movement of big data to the edge devices, every product now needs to address how it will interact with a machine readable agreed on tagging scheme.

We were very pleased to have our first ever contributing editor of AutomatedBuildings.com at the event. Tom Hartman was on a self learning journey to observe our changing industry.

The one piece of paper, paperless conference started with this story of stone soup so I will end my review with it. It is a good summary as well as opening. Thanks John.

The Fable of the Stone Soup – Updated

A system integrator weary from hours of manual effort to map data from different systems and devices sat down to assess his fate. There could be no value delivered to his customer, or money to be made for himself, if every project required this painful manual process. If only, he thought, everyone would define their data in such as way that it could be easily interpreted – automatically even – by his trusty laptop – oh but that’s just a dream he thought.

Sometime later he happened upon an energy engineer struggling to do analysis of meter data to identify demand peaks across a portfolio of buildings who said – if only the meters had been named in such a way that I could tell which was which and what was what. It would save me so much time and save my customer so much money – oh but that is just a dream he thought.

As the system integrator traveled the country going from project to project the same problem faced him at every turn. There has to be a solution he thought. But what can I do? I am just a lone engineer... with deep experience in variable volume air distribution systems. If only there were others like me – maybe would could work together on a solution... Oh but that’s only a dream. No one cooperates on standards in our industry.

Unlike the software industry where open source initiatives to solve industry-wide needs are the norm not the exception. (with sarcasm)

Our system integrator traveled the world and shared his story with everyone he met.

The data center expert who said – I don’t know much about VAV – but I sure know PUE.

The Chiller plant genius who said I don’t know much about energy rates, but I can predict a chiller’s fate.

And the energy analyst who said I’ve never touched an actuator but I know my energy factors.

And together they came, each with knowledge of piece of equipment, device or system. They pooled their knowledge and realized that all of this seemingly unorganized equipment could be modeled in a uniform way. And with the help of some wizards of the bytes and bits they created a solution they knew would be a hit.

Easy to use, applicable to any type of system, device or data, open source, free to use, extensible, human and machine readable, and most important – driven by the community to meet their real world needs.

And that my friends is the story of Project-Haystack – the solution for making device data self-describing. They key to unlocking the value in our operational data.

And one helluva a good reason to have a party.

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