This white paper, by Richard Greenane and Simon Dobson (Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland), discusses the development of a LonWorks based control system that integrates LonWorks protocols along with standard PCs interconnected via Ethernet. This has the advantage of reducing the number of required LonWorks interface cards and connections, since they are not normally present… in PCs, in favor of ubiquitous Ethernet interconnections. This was accomplished by incorporating a middleware software component developed for LonWorks based on CORBA technologies, allowing a seamless interaction between multiple client PCs and a single host that contains a LonWorks network interface card.

In this white paper, the authors explain the tool they developed and present results from some simple tests. It is shown that, based on the developed tool, LonWorks networks can be controlled by many operating systems; and software clients can be written using any programming language. Further work is in process to provide an event service for the bridge so that LonWorks network events are handled efficiently under the Linux operating system. A policy service is also being developed that supports a large number of additional components, to provide new services such as resource sharing and data encryption.

Read white paper (160K Byte PDF file)

 
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