"Big" Project Help

elytronic

We are bidding on a quite big project for us. It is a 20000sq.ft. house with 3 floors. There is a rack on each floor with one NI3100 in each rack to control the equipment in the rack: audio and video switchers, request, kaleidescape,e.t.c. There is also a 200 load, 63 keypad Homeworks system to be integrated. We have 12-15 touchpanels in the system. What I am worrying is the following: we have about 35 heating zones using Aprilaire thermostats and about 120 security zones. Also about 20 zones of VRV airconditioning. Should I dedicate one NI2100 for the heating and cooling and one for the security or the 3xNI3100s are enough to handle everything?

vining

elytronic wrote:

Should I dedicate one NI2100 for the heating and cooling and one for the security or the 3xNI3100s are enough to handle everything?

Well that really depends on your code and what it's doing. If it's written to use the processor's resources efficiently you could run everything off of one master.

yuri

in terms of redundancy it might be a good idea to dedicate a master to a specific job:
1) security
2) heating
3) a/v stuffs

if one master fails, you only loose some functionality...

In a project as big as yours i don't think 1 or 2 extra NI controllers killing the budget

elytronic

This got me thinking about processors and their processing power. I was wondering if the NI700 and NI900 are as powerful as the NI2100 and the NI3100? I can very easily dedicate one NI700 for security and one for Heating and Cooling. But can the smaller controller handle this or should go for an NI2100 or NI3100?

yuri

as far as i know the NI-700 and NI-900 are comparable with the NI-x000 series (not the NI-x100 series)

i'll paste some information from another thread to show to difference between the NI-x000 series and the NI-x100 series.

|Test Type                |     NI3000      |    NI3100     |
|===========================================================|

|************************ Random Data **********************|
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
|Bubble Sort              |     23364ms     |     9226ms    |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
|Bubble Sort Indexed      |     11976ms     |     4560ms    |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
|Shell Sort (Pratt)       |      3380ms     |     1321ms    |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
|Shell Sort(mhermanns)    |      2194ms     |      878ms    |
|===========================================================|


|********************** Presorted Data *********************|
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
|Bubble Sort              |     16880ms     |     6442ms    |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
|Bubble Sort Indexed      |      9713ms     |     3753ms    |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
|Shell Sort (Pratt)       |      1704ms     |      639ms    |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
|Shell Sort(mhermanns)    |       536ms     |      207ms    |
|===========================================================|

glr-fti

I am running a similar sized home but with more TP's, more lighting loads and KP's, security and HVAC zones, ReQuest, etc. on one 3100 without any problems. Now I have a few other processors for local AV control but the main work is being performed by one 3100. Reduce feedback data to only panels that are currently active.

The redundancy issue is a very good one however and you need to decide what level of outage your client could live with in the event of a failure. How often does a processor fail vs cost/performance of additional hardware?

jprovan

We run a site that is larger (by a factor of 2) on a single 2100 processor for the control of the systems with very good response time and "feel".

Written properly, the 3100 that you are looking at can handle the load. Redundancy is a factor, but segmenting control of the systems has to be viewed from the point of view of whether or not they are independent subsystems. If they need to interact with each other, as in maintaining state of the resources, you may have to write some routines for the processors to communicate information with each other.

HVAC, security, and quite possibly lighting are good candidates for segmentation. The issue is integration of the control of lighting on the touch panels. For instance, you may be using hard lighting keypads with the system that have some special functions on them like turning XM radio on. Conversely, you can have phantom keypads on the touch panel that need to communicate with Homeworks. In that case, you have two separate processors competing for the whole house's resources. If not handled properly, it can get a bit confusing. There are ways to do it, but I have seen it done badly and the separate processors get out of sync with each other.

The processors are powerful enough to handle very "big" projects. I personally am not an advocate of segmenting control to multiple processors as this incurs a whole different set of issues on maintaining state, serialization of resource, and overall control.