At the recent 2022 National HVACR Education Conference, Contemporary Controls met with HVACR educators and professionals to demonstrate how our open controllers, such as the BASpi-Edge, BASpi-IO, and BACcontrol22, and our BAScontrol Toolset facilitate hands-on training.
At Contemporary Controls, we take great pride in our commitment to education and training. We know that modern HVACR classrooms use technology to network, control, and analyse automation processes and require equipment which is intuitive and easy for students to use. We have worked with several affiliated colleges and technical schools to develop training programs that include practical automation classroom/lab experiences that mimic real world applications.
"Many of the instructors at the conference also work as HVACR contractors, so they have first-hand experience about what is required in the field," said Joe Stasiek, sales manager at Contemporary Controls. "Our goal is to make it easy for instructors to prepare HVACR students for these technical careers by providing reliable and user-friendly equipment built upon open source technologies, an educational discount on all hardware, and free software tools."
Our BAScontrol and BASpi family of controllers that were featured at the HVACR Education Conference provide the building blocks for HVACR controller training. Our concept of an open controller is one that uses:
- BACnet—an open protocol
- Sedona—an open source drag-and-drop component-based programming language
- BAScontrol Toolset—a complete set of unrestricted programming, emulation, and archiving tools
"My professional career began as an electronics technician, and I benefited by working with dedicated professionals willing to donate their time in teaching me the technology used in the industry. I see the same level of dedication with the HVACR educators," said George Thomas, president of Contemporary Controls. "As a manufacturer, we can do our part in supporting our industry with equipment that is simple to use by aspiring technicians."
In the classroom, students manipulate their controllers by downloading the free BAScontrol Toolset, The toolkit includes the Sedona Application Editor (SAE), BASbackup Project Utility, and BASemulator for Windows PC.
"The BAScontrol Toolset provides training tools at no additional cost," said Stasiek. "The BASemulator in the toolset mirrors full controller operation that instructors can customize for specific classroom applications."
In addition to our free software tools, we offer a set of pre-built Sedona applications with pre-assigned BACnet points list, sequence of operation, system schematic, and suggested device list, all available for free download. These can be used as examples to students of a full automation project implementation and project submittal.
While the BAScontrol20 and BAScontrol22 controllers are best utilized as classroom tools, the BASpi Controllers allows students to work from home for hands-on, virtual training. This proved to be an asset when distance learning became the required mode of instruction during pandemic shutdowns.
Our products do not require a license and are available to all without restrictions. Years of field-proven reliability–unlicensed and unrestricted–plus a complementary educational discount make our products perfectly suited for training and education.
In addition to providing HVACR training resources, we offer an online, free Industrial Ethernet University to educate anyone interested in industrial and building automation on the benefits of deploying Industrial Ethernet for a variety of applications.
Visit our training and education page to learn more.