Recently started a position involving BMS systems (new area for myself) and the team is against using Ignition for interfacing with BACnet. The stated reason is that the driver is known to not be efficient/has issues and isn't sufficient in dealing with 300+ devices which we deal with occasionally. So the current standard is to use Kepware as a middleware to convert to OPC-UA.
Browsing the internet, I am not seeing this sentiment towards Ignition's BACnet driver and thinking we could swap Kepware with Ignition Edge which would keep our system consolidated to one system and give us access to MQTT.
So I am wondering if my teams concerns are valid? And what limitations there are with Ignition's BACnet driver?
I'm fairly new to Ignition and we have a site where we need to communicate to Carrier PIC6 controllers, and out of 40, I got one to "Initialize", but when I look into reading a value in the OPC Quick Client, I get a Bad Quality. Can't dismiss Ignition's driver yet, as I need to look into Carrier's native BACnet I/P settings some more. But after working with Niagara controllers for years, I miss having an integrated BACnet discovery tool in my BAS.
This is something we're keenly aware is missing... it's part of a batch of BACnet improvements we're hoping to tackle once the current driver team work for the 2027.2 version wraps up and ships... it's not a timeline that makes it immediately useful to you, but at least it's coming some day.