Innon Niagara Essential Toolkit

You will be pleased to know that for the last year, Innon has been developing the Innon Niagara Essential Toolkit. 

The Innon Niagara Essential Toolkit is a range of Niagara 4 drivers developed, tested and maintained by Innon.

The Innon Niagara Essential Toolkit has two products, with several more coming in 2023:

• The Innon HTTP API
• The Innon JSON Parser

The Innon HTTP API and JSON Toolkit open up data flows between the Niagara Framework and other web or locally-based APIs, allowing end-users to see how and where they choose their data. 

Innon HTTP API and JSON was identified as a product we needed to develop for two reasons:

1. We needed to provide Niagara modules to allow data to be received using HTTP Post methods from our then pipeline LoRaWAN product – MileSight
2. The standard Tridium modules available did not fit the licensing model our customers, or we felt comfortable with. We wanted our Tridium Partners to be able to get data from any Niagara 4 system quickly and in an affordable way.

We knew developing our modules was a significant task with no insignificant costs. Still, we knew our MileSight product could not shine without this vital piece of the communications chain being "right" from the get-go.

Typically, wireless data has been integrated using gateways with traditional BEMS comms protocols such as BACnet and Modbus. One of our existing product ranges, Enless, does just that. However, with the broader adoption of IoT applications and their use of Restful APIs being catered for more and more by the Niagara framework, using the same method to transfer wireless data locally on the site is now familiar in the BEMS world. Indeed, the Innon API/JSON product also lends itself to other applications that require a Restful API, e.g. obtaining weather data from a cloud service over the web.

There might be two reasons why System Integrators, BMS, and IoT companies would use these two products:

1. Easily get wireless LoRaWAN data into Niagara stations.

Wireless devices are typically sensors that provide data such as air quality, ambient conditions, water leakage etc. The Wireless LoraWAN sensors are usually used in:

• Installations where ease of use and low cost of installation are essential. You do not need power or comms wires.
• Scenarios where the position of the monitored space is such that hard-wiring devices are not possible or cost prohibitive, e.g. in a listed or historic building where chasing cables or running conduit and trunking could be destructive and therefore would not be permitted

• Where forecast weather data is needed from a web API to determine levels of pre-cooling using free cool night air if the next day's forecast is for high temperatures
• Where energy data needs to be pushed from the Niagara BEMS up to a cloud API
• Where local travel information, current and forecasted weather data etc., needs to be incorporated into a Niagara PX page to provide a richer dashboard experience

These products are essential for any company that offers innovative and cost-effective solutions using LoRaWAN technology and Niagara. 

These products can be used to obtain data from other sources and send data to other sources as part of various Niagara station functions. Here are a few examples:

• Innon API/JSON receives and creates Niagara points from LoRaWAN temperature sensors – the points are used in the natural ventilation and ground source heat-pump control of a building floor with high thermal mass – the battery-powered sensors would work well in this application as they only need to transmit every 10 minutes due to the slow nature of the building's thermal response which does not require close control.
• A JACE 8000 is being used for logging data from a number of electricity sub-meters using Modbus – each submeter's total energy reading needs to be pushed to a cloud aM&T app every 15 minutes using the Innon API components.
• A web supervisor provides a dashboard view for a corporate office reception area – energy usage graphs, average floor temperatures, outside ambient conditions etc., are shown using data from the BEMS. Still, the Innon API/JSON modules can obtain local underground services data, such as each line status, next train departures etc., from TFL's web API.

Comparison with existing products:

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