Service
Station engineering and new controller setup
Standing up a new station or a new controller, properly, from platform commissioning to a handover pack. The station is the BMS head end for everything under it, so the boring half done right — naming, tagging, security, histories and backups — is the half that decides whether the site is maintainable in year three.
- Platform commissioning
- TLS / certificates
- BACnet & Modbus
- Tagging
- Histories
- Backups
New station, end to end
Platform commissioning
Distribution files and the correct Niagara version for the hardware, platform daemon, licence and certificate install, host ID registration, system passphrase recorded, TLS enabled on the platform and Fox ports.
Security before anything is connected
Default credentials gone, a real user and role model with least privilege, password policy, an authentication scheme that is not the default, and the platform listening only where it should.
Drivers and discovery
BACnet/IP and MS/TP, Modbus TCP and RTU, or whatever the field devices speak. Discovery, device and point creation, poll rates set deliberately rather than left at default — a JACE can be brought to its knees by an over-eager poll scheme long before it runs out of points. If you want to know what is on the network before anyone is engaged, we publish three free tools for the first hour on site.
Naming and tagging
A naming convention applied uniformly, and Haystack or Niagara tags applied as the points are created rather than retro-fitted later. This is the single decision that determines whether analytics, standard PX sheets and bulk engineering are cheap or impossible on this site.
Histories, alarms, schedules
History extensions with intervals chosen to fit the flash on the device, alarm classes and routing that a human can actually act on, schedules and calendars modelled once and referenced rather than copied.
Supervisor connection
Station added to the Supervisor, Niagara Network wiring, history and alarm federation, provisioning jobs, and a verified restore — a backup nobody has restored is not a backup.
Handover pack
Point schedule, network diagram, credential and passphrase handover, backup procedure, and a note of every decision a future engineer would otherwise have to reverse-engineer from the station.
Also available on its own
Controller replacement
Moving a station onto new hardware: station copy, licence and certificate transfer, driver revalidation, third-party module check, and a rollback plan.
Health review
An existing station reviewed against the list above — security posture, poll load, history sizing, alarm noise, backup state — with findings ranked by what will bite first.
Tagging retrofit
Applying a consistent tag model across a station that was built without one, scripted rather than clicked, so analytics and standard graphics become possible.
Deliverables
What you actually receive
Fixed price per deliverable, quoted against a written specification. No hourly billing, and no price before the scope is in writing.
| Deliverable | Detail |
|---|---|
| A commissioned station | Licensed, secured, backed up and documented, with TLS on and defaults gone. |
| A point schedule | Every point, its ORD, its tags, its history and alarm configuration, as a document you keep. |
| A verified backup and restore | Proven by performing the restore, not by the backup job reporting success. |
| The handover pack | Credentials, passphrase, diagrams, conventions and decisions, written down. |
After the job
Support afterwards is part of the offer
A station is commissioned once and lived in for years: a question about why an alarm routed the way it did, a tag or a history added, a certificate renewed before it expires rather than after. How support works.
Also
Other services
Niagara 5 migration
Niagara 5 readiness audits and migration, including JACE 8000 to JACE 9000: which third-party modules survive the new runtime and mandatory signing.
Custom modules & drivers
Bespoke Niagara rt, wb and ux modules and drivers written against the Baja API: pure Java, signed, and stamped to install across a mixed estate.
Operator graphics
Niagara operator screens built once and reused: standard PX plant sheets bound by relative ORD, bajaux web widgets and dashboards, and a written standard.
Workbench tooling
Custom Workbench views and tools for repetitive Niagara work: bulk renaming and retagging, station audits, provisioning helpers and module inventories.
IoT & LoRaWAN
Custom IoT and LoRaWAN builds: decoders that survive a station, a self-hosted ChirpStack server, MQTT, and the points or dashboards the readings become.
Integration audit
A fixed-scope paid audit of an existing integration: what talks to what, where it breaks, and what fixing it would take.
Protocols & data
Field protocol integration and the data behind it: BACnet, Modbus, M-Bus and MQTT, into a building system, a database or a dashboard.
Web, apps & DevOps
Web and app builds with the DevOps around them: front end, backend, the database under it, and the build, deploy and monitoring work that keeps it up.
Website design
Remote website design services for small firms: a few real pages, fixed price, and a measured handover — HTTPS, broken links, Lighthouse, page weight.
Spreadsheets & internal tools
An audit of the spreadsheet a team runs on — every rule it encodes, and which ones contradict each other — then one bounded slice of it as a web app.
Notes
Written up in more detail
The engineering behind this service, in public, with no pitch attached. All notes.
What a station checks before loading a module
Niagara's four verification-mode values, what each demands of your certificate, and the permissions that force a signature check even in low mode.
- Module signing
- Certificates
- Deployment
JACE-8000 to JACE-9000: what the licence transfer does and does not do
The JACE 8000 to 9000 licence transfer, step by step: what it requires, what it does not include, and which parts cannot be undone.
- JACE
- Migration
- Licensing
Renaming and tagging points in bulk
Point names arrive from the field device and there is no standard. What to use to select, rename and tag in bulk — and what a rename quietly breaks.
- Bulk engineering
- Tagging
- Workbench
Getting data out of a Niagara station
REST, MQTT, a relational history database, file export or an HTTP client. Which suits which consumer, and what each one costs you to run.
- Integration
- Histories
- MQTT
Scheduled station backups, and the gap
A Supervisor can back up every station in its Niagara Network on a schedule. The station it does not cover that way is its own.
- Backups
- Provisioning
- Supervisor
Why a station polls too slowly
Slow, Normal and Fast are three numbers you choose, and one default tuning policy applied to every point is the usual reason a station feels sluggish.
- Station engineering
- Performance
- BACnet
BACnet MS/TP on a JACE
Baud, MAC address, Max Master and Max Info Frames. Four settings on one Link component decide whether an RS-485 trunk works, crawls or drops the token.
- BACnet
- MS/TP
- Commissioning
The certificate on a new JACE
Every station starts with a self-signed certificate it generated itself. What that is good for, what it is not, and what breaks on the day it expires.
- TLS
- Certificates
- Commissioning
Tags, dictionaries and the licence you need
Tagging is how a station describes itself to software that did not engineer it. Three kinds of tag, one namespace, and a licence feature that gates it.
- Tagging
- Data modelling
- Haystack
History capacity on a JACE
The default capacity is 500 records, the default name collides, and one setting decides whether a full history overwrites data or stops collecting.
- Histories
- JACE
- Station engineering
Why a Modbus point reads the wrong register
Modbus decimal addressing is zero-based, vendor documentation is not, and the Address Format property decides which of the two you are typing.
- Modbus
- Integration
- Station engineering
Why an alarm never reached anybody
Detection, alarm class and recipient are three separate objects. Check them in that order to find the unlinked step that kept the alarm inside the station.
- Alarms
- Station engineering
- Commissioning
Niagara schedules: special events and master copies
Special event priority is list order, a partly-filled special event falls back to the weekly schedule, and an imported schedule cannot be edited locally.
- Scheduling
- Station engineering
- Commissioning
A navigation tree that builds itself
Hierarchies generate the nav tree from tags and NEQL queries instead of hand-placed nodes — and the cache hides your edits until you rebuild it.
- Hierarchies
- Tagging
- Station engineering
Templates: build the AHU once, deploy it fifty times
Component, application and station templates do different jobs — and only one of them supports bulk deployment from a spreadsheet and upgrade in place.
- Templates
- Bulk engineering
- Station engineering
Doing one thing to fifty stations at once
Provisioning runs platform tasks across a whole NiagaraNetwork from one Supervisor connection — and the obvious backup action is the wrong one.
- Provisioning
- Estate management
- Supervisor
Roles, categories and the grid between them
A user authenticates and every view is empty. Permissions are a grid of category against level, held by a role — read it in that order to find the gap.
- Station security
- Permissions
- Commissioning
Why a writable point ignores the value you set
Sixteen priority inputs, two of them reserved for right-click actions, a fallback underneath, and a BACnet scheme wired to none of it.
- Station engineering
- BACnet
- Commissioning
What the Niagara MQTT driver will and will not do
It is licensed, it is capped below your licence, it is a client only, and its Discover button never contacts the broker.
- Integration
- MQTT
- Drivers
Platform or station: two connections, two sets of logins
Two processes, two Java VMs, two logins and two file trees — and most "it works in Workbench but not the browser" starts here.
- Platform
- Station engineering
- Workbench
A JACE-8000 has no onboard I/O: using the Nrio driver
Remote IO-R modules on RS-485, one network per port, and the conversion list Workbench will happily let you get wrong.
- JACE
- Drivers
- Commissioning
Conversion links: what a mismatched wire really does
Link a boolean to a numeric and Niagara inserts a converter with its own properties. Here is what each one assumes on your behalf.
- Station engineering
- Wire sheet
- Workbench
Authentication schemes: each Niagara user picks one
A station runs several login mechanisms at once and the choice is per user, not per station. What each one is for, and what 4.15 added that 4.14 has not.
- Station security
- Permissions
- Station engineering
What a BACnet discovery sweep actually tells you
Who-Is stops at the subnet, I-Am carries no device name, and an object list from a device that cannot segment has to be read one index at a time.
- BACnet
- Discovery
- Commissioning
Why a Modbus network sits at 95% busy time
Busy time is the duty cycle of one poll thread per network, not host CPU. What it measures, where the time goes, and what actually brings it down.
- Modbus
- Performance
- Station engineering
What Niagara does with the Modbus address you type
The address field is a format plus a string, and the format defaults to hex. What each format does to the number, and where the boundaries fall through.
- Modbus
- Integration
- Station engineering
Why a BACnet write relinquishes on its own
Fallback is level 17, which is not a BACnet priority. What the driver sends when a point falls to it, and why the in slot sometimes changes nothing.
- BACnet
- Integration
- Station engineering
Letting an agent write to a control system
A write to a station is a plant movement at a priority, not a variable assignment — and the export list is not the fence it is taken for.
- Agents
- Permissions
- Station engineering
Next step
Send the equipment schedule and the controller list.
Station work is priced from what is being connected and how many points it carries, so those two documents are usually enough for a fixed price rather than a range.