AN OPEN APPROACH TO EIB/KNX SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

EIB/KNX is a field bus used in home and building automation. When building application programs for EIB/KNX nodes, one was hitherto faced with low-level constructs. To improve this situation, a RAD (Rapid Application Development) like approach was adopted. This model encapsulates the system software entities in a way which is inspired by the object-oriented paradigm. It also makes use of functional blocks to describe the application behaviour. To allow the roles of software developer and project engineer to be separated, the tool chain is designed for interfacing with an integration tool. The article discusses the work flow when building an EIB/KNX system and the resulting requirements on the tool chain. The GCC-based solution which was developed is pre sented. Specific challenges in porting the GNU tool chain to the standard microcontroller for EIB/KNX nodes are sketched. The implementation also includes an open PC-based EIB/KNX network access and management server.