Siemens Apogee P1 (FLN) Driver

Overview

Supported devices include TEC controllers of every revision, ATEC, PTEC, LTEC, LAB controllers, VFDs, and power meters, up to 32 per RS-485 trunk, addressed 1 to 99, at a configurable baud rate defaulting to 4800. Device discovery pings every address on the trunk and reports each responder's revision and application code. Point discovery uploads metadata from the device: number, name, type, value, unit, slope, intercept, and the true and false text of boolean points. All twelve P1 point types are handled, each becoming the matching Numeric or Boolean point, read-only or writable. Scaling is applied automatically, and device units map to Niagara units, so a Fahrenheit point can be shown in Celsius. Writing a null value releases an override back to program control. Tuning policies set the poll rate and choose whether a write lands in EEPROM or RAM only, protecting the limited EEPROM write cycles of points driven by logic. Licensing is perpetual, bound to the Host ID.

List of FAQs

Why connect to the field devices instead of the Apogee panel? The driver speaks P1 directly on the FLN trunk, so it reads and writes TEC and other field controllers without an Apogee panel, Insight, or any other supervisory layer in between. That makes it a modernisation path for sites where the head end is being replaced but the field equipment is sound and worth keeping. What hardware is needed to run it? A Niagara host with a real RS-485 port, which in practice means a JACE. A Supervisor has no serial port, so it can only reach a P1 trunk through a serial-over-IP gateway presenting a virtual COM port. Wiring is 2-wire shielded twisted pair, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, 4800 bps by default. A device shows up twice in discovery. Why? Address 99 is the P1 broadcast address, and every TEC controller answers on it regardless of its own address. A single device therefore appears once at its configured address and once at 99. Add it only at its configured address. Nothing is discovered at all. What should be checked? Check the RS-485 wiring and that termination resistors are fitted at both ends of the bus. Confirm the COM port name is right and no other application holds the port. Confirm the devices are powered and carry unique addresses, and that the baud rate matches the bus, which is 4800 for most P1 devices. Check the license as well: without a valid one the network raises a configuration fault and sends no requests. What is the difference between the EEPROM and RAM write policies? P1 devices store written values in EEPROM, which typically survives around 100,000 write cycles. That is fine for setpoints a person changes occasionally, but a point driven by automatic logic can wear the EEPROM out. Assigning such a point the RAM policy writes to RAM only, so the value is lost on a power cycle but costs no write cycles. A few points reject RAM-only writes and fault; move those back to an EEPROM policy.