C-Bus Products Specifications

Hello Noobie here,

1) Is C-Bus communication is only possible with Schneider Electric Products i.e dimmers, gateways, inputs and output devices?

2) If it is No,

a) How can I find the suitable devices for my project. How to identify the devices above mentioned are c-bus compatible or not?
is there any certification or product list database in online are there just like DALI protocol to pick the device which is best for you?

b) As a BMS solution providers, can we able to get the c-bus data using CNI or PCI without having to worry about the c-bus internal devices, if it is c-bus compatible?

 

C-Bus is proprietary Clipsal/Schneider. There are no other supplies of C-bus compatible gear.
Using a CNI/PCI you have access to read/write to any device in the network. The protocol documentation is available on-line for free.
Generally for BMS access you are better of using a product called Cgate which runs on a windows PC (it's JAve so people have in running on Linux based machines as well). CGate provides a high level interface which is much easier to use than direct CNI/PCI access. It is a free download from the Clipsal/Schneider website and is well documented.

 

What if one c-bus monitoring device is connected to CNI throught c-gate, And we want to add one more centralized Building monitoring device which is also capable of runnig c-gate and want to connect to same CNI. is it possible?

is multiple devices can access CNI at a time?

 

You can only have a single connection to a CNI. Cgate will accept multiple connections which is why it is the best solution for most installations. You can install multiple CNI's if you want to.

 

Thanks again for the reply. Here's what I understood so far about c-gate and CNI. Please correct me if I'm wrong

c-gate is a server which used to communicate with cni or pci right?
we can connect with c-gate using telnet port 20023,20024,20025.
then c-gate connects with any CNI using its ip address and default port 10001. Therefore we can't have multiple connection, since it uses default port for the connection.

Now if I try to have multiple connection using c-gate. Will it cause any synchronizing problem?

 

That is all correct.
Cgate is designed to handle multiple concurrent connection. Any change on the bus will be set to all connected clients. Any change made by a client will be sent to the bus and all other connected clients. Cgate builds a model of the connected networks and keeps a local copy of all network variables, so getting information from Cgate does not require any polling of the network

 

For out of-the-box BMS integration you are probably better off using a NAC (5500NAC2). The NAC provides a native BACnet server, allowing a BMS to view/control selected C-Bus objects.