bfr-developers — BACnet Firewall Router Developers

[BFR] SourceForge Project Updated

[Joel B. <jo...@ca...>]

BACneteers,


I had received some email messages from the SourceForge folks about "upgrading" the project to their new platform.  After the last round of patches I decided to try it and see what happens.  The subversion checkout command has changed to the new location and they recommend developers get a fresh checkout:

svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/bfr/code/trunk bfr-code

Notice that you'll only get the trunk, which will be fine after I update the documentation from the old hand coded HTML to Sphinx.


Joel

Re: [BFR] bfr

[Joel B. <jj...@co...>]

Jim,


> Although I have been a user for some time, I am just delving into the BACnet standard.

Welcome to the jungle, we take it day by day.  If you want it you're gonna bleed but it's the price to pay!  Funny what songs pop into your head while you're responding to BACnet email.

> I like the concept of the BACnet Firewall Router.  I think we should be looking at implementing it.

What platform are you going to be using?  I run it now with a variety of different compilers and OS platforms and I would like to add more.  Some of the BFR concepts are going to be rolled into my BACloud (BACnet Cloud) service and I would really like you folks to participate.

> I am interested in BACnet 135-2008 addendum ag (and others) and wonder if BFR is the best way to implement this, independant of any vendor.

As far as I know there are no other open source software packages that work this way.  I have not used the BACnet stack developed and supported by Steve Karg [1] which is also for things like this [2].  Let me know what I can do to help!


Joel
[1] <http://bacnet.sourceforge.net/>
[2] <http://bacnetdevelopmentkit.com/>

Re: [BFR] Status

[Joel B. <jo...@ca...>]

Mikie,


> I was wondering what the status of development was.

Quiet.  I have versions of this code as specialized routing and BBMD code in production, but nothing is broken, so it hasn't had any more development time.  I have been busy with BACpypes and some other BACnet related projects.

Be aware that this code base stops at the network layer, it does not have an application layer.  It also does not handle the half-router messages correctly (I-Could-Be-Router-To-Network, Establish-Connection-To-Network, etc).

> Is there a binary ready to evaluate?

No, you need to build it on your platform.

> Or Source?

The source code is here [1] and you can check it out here [2].  There is a build script in the BFR/ subdirectory of the trunk/.  There is documentation in the tags/0.2/Documentation/ directory that is going to be moved over the to sphinx trunk/doc/ directory at some point.

The tags/0.2/Testing/ directory has some older test files, I'm not sure if they work correctly, it's been a while.  In the trunk/test/ directory is a sample application that is supposed to do the same thing when you use the BFR application with the XML configuration file as when you use the code as a library.  My intent is to go through the rest of the older samples and make sure they work, and translate them to CPP applications as well.

If you have a specific application I could help you with it.


Joel
[1] <http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/bfr/browser/trunk>
[2] <http://sourceforge.net/projects/bfr/develop>

[BFR] Status

[Mikie <km...@mi...>]

Hello,

I was wondering what the status of development was.

Is there a binary ready to evaluate?

Or Source?

Thanks.

[BFR] New pages and boards

[Joel B. <jo...@ca...>]

BACneteers,


A thousand pardons if it seems like you are getting spammed with BFR notifications in your inbox or Google+ stream.  This will go back to its usual quietness shortly.

In case you are a Google+ user, there is a new page/stream [1] devoted to the project where I will be posting project commits which may or may not be easier to track than mailing list stuff.  And if you are interesting in what is in the queue to get done and what I'm working on now, there is a Trello board [2] that seems pretty slick.  Feel free to join and put up some cards if you would like (I think I have to invite you, but it's a public board so I'm not exactly sure how that will work).


Joel
[1] <https://plus.google.com/101188874349659771056/posts>
[2] <https://trello.com/board/bacnet-firewall-router/4ea603cd499d85823a0c640a>

[BFR] Trello Boards Available

[Joel B. <jo...@ca...>]

BACneteers,


Joel Spolsky, who cofounded Stack Overflow and Fog Creek Software, has created a new collaboration service called Trello [1].  There is "A Conversation with Joel Spolsky" video [2] that I can't watch until I get into work tomorrow (for reasons that are mostly pathetic).  But that didn't stop me from jumping in.

I created a "BACneteers" organization [3] and added boards for BACpypes [4] and BFR [5] to it for good measure.  There could obviously be lots of other boards, like those for the SPC working groups, but I thought I would keep it simple and just dump my two projects there.

Join if you would like, it would be interesting to know your success at joining the organization and putting "stuff" on the "board".


Joel
[1] <https://trello.com>
[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF8ZVB-v3IM>
[3] <https://trello.com/bacneteers>
[4] <https://trello.com/board/bacpypes/4ea6038072bf960d4b036f34>
[5] <https://trello.com/board/bacnet-firewall-router/4ea603cd499d85823a0c640a>

[BFR] BFR Progress is being made!

[Joel B. <jj...@co...>]

BACneteers,


[
  This message is being sent directly to you as well as to the new mailing
  list because I have corresponded with you in the past - sometimes in the 
  very distant past!

  This has been a pretty quiet project for a long time, and you may
  not have been notified via some SourceForge mechanism that there is new
  activity.  If you are no longer interested in the project, please accept
  my apologies, and if you are, please sign up for the mailing list.
]

The home page of the project is now synchronized with the documentation which is moving to Sphinx, and also part of the repository.  I also enabled Trac support, so Trac tickets can be used for bugs and enhancement requests and the wiki can be used as well (but I expect that the wiki won't be used much).

The original "big pile of code" directory in the CVS repository has been split into three pieces in the new subversion trunk; the BACnet/ directory is just the code for the stack, the MinML/ directory contains the XML parsing code, and the BFR/ contains the rest.  Some additional files have been added to the BFR directory which hold the "factory" functions which used to be mixed in with the BACnet code, so it's shuffling beans under the shells than anything new.

The test/ contains some trivial configuration files, duplicates of ones in the old Testing/ directory, now a subdirectory of tags/0.2/ which wasn't part of the old CVS repository.  I'm expecting to turn these into tutorial samples.  Now that the XML processing has been split from the BACnet library it should be much easier to build specialized applications that can fit in embedded devices, and this will be part of the tutorial as well.

I would appreciate it if you could check out the trunk and let me know what you think.  Again, if you are no longer interested, please accept my apologies and disregard this message.


Joel

[BFR] Project Reorganization

[Joel B. <jo...@ca...>]

BFR Developers,


I'm pleased to announce that the BFR Developers mailing list is now up and running.  Using a mailing list fits into the rest of the workflow that I use for BACpypes, my other SourceForge project.  There are more changes too...

- I've moved the code from CVS to Subversion.  While it's not as powerful as git, it's a lot better.  There is a tag/0.2 directory that contains the old stuff for reference.  I haven't shut off CVS yet, but I've already mucked around with the code, so it should be considered obsolete.

- I'm starting the move of the documentation from hand edited HTML pages to Sphinx, just like BACpypes.

- The project HTML page <http://bfr.sourceforge.net> is synced with the documentation.

- The XML code has been split from the BACnet library.  It should be much easier to build small BFR applications by including just the modules you need.  The 'make' file in the trunk is wrong, so I've made a bunch of changes but they are untested.

- There is a Trac site <https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/bfr> which makes it much easier to browse through the source code tree and submit tickets (bugs and enhancement requests).

I hope you like the changes!


Joel