Welcome to Normal Framework¶
The Normal Framework, or NF, is a software framework designed for Internet of Things application developers, particularly those involving building systems. It is based on many years' experience of building, deploying, and operating cloud-connected software products. It uses modern technologies to make it straightforward to scale and operate applications connected to a large number of sites.
Who is NF For?¶
The Normal Framework is for software developers and systems integrators who want a flexible solution to build their application on, that lets them quickly integrate with many different types of equipment. While the full set of applications is limited only by your creativity, we develop it with a few different types of solution in mind:
- Energy optimization, which collects data from equipment and uses analytics to provide feedback to operators or automatically alter the operation of the equipment.
- Smart grid "behind the meter" systems, which allow sites to respond to changing electric grid conditions.
- Fault detection solutions, which look at operational data to predict problems.
- Enterprise data systems (e.g., ERP, CMMS, or IWMS systems) which want to get consistent, granular data about the buildings in a portfolio,
- Occupant-responsive applications, which allow inhabitents of the building to interact more deeply with the building systems.
What does NF Do?¶
The primary goal of NF is to make installing, configurating, and operating an application which requires building system integration fast, cheap, and reliable. NF provides the following capabilities:
- Highly optimized BACnet and Modbus data discovery and acquisition; large sites with more than 100,000 objects can be scanned in a few minutes.
- Monitoring tools which allow operators to quickly detect outages and network changes, and quickly respond to them.
- System Modeling tools which let integrators quickly normalize data; for instance by building a Brick or Haystack model.
- A powerful SDK for building portable, reusable applications and integrations.
- Robust API support for developing secure, cloud-ready applications using standards like gRPC, REST, OIDC, and Sparkplug.
- A user-friendly management console for performing common integration setup tasks.