Lombard Odier — a connected campus: multi-protocol routing & solar tracking

At the new Geneva headquarters, Paul Vaucher SA deployed 50 WBox S485 KNX gateways: DALI/KNX/BACnet routing to OPC UA, plus gateway-driven solar tracking of the blinds.

Lombard Odier headquarters (“1Roof”), Bellevue (Geneva). Photo: Hello at LO / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The project

Lombard Odier’s new headquarters in Bellevue (Geneva), inaugurated in 2025, brings nearly 2,000 employees under one roof. Paul Vaucher SA, a Geneva-based electrical and building-automation integrator, entrusted the Weble WBox with interconnecting the building systems.

50 WBox S485 KNX gateways handle native routing between the building buses and the OPC UA supervision — and one of them drives the solar tracking of the blinds.

See the integrator — Paul Vaucher SA →

The architecture at a glance

Integration architecture — Lombard Odier campusDALIAddressable lightingKNXHVAC & blindsBACnetBMS & HVAC plant50×WBox S485 KNXNative protocol routingOPC UACentral supervisionSun · Wind · Rainsensors & sun positionSolar trackingazimuth calc · wind/rain alarmon one WBox of the fleetBlinds by sector

Each WBox speaks the building buses on one side and OPC UA on the other: DALI, KNX and BACnet points become OPC UA nodes that the central supervision reads and commands. In parallel, one dedicated gateway runs the solar tracking of the blinds.

Routing DALI, KNX and BACnet to OPC UA

The campus mixes several buses: addressable DALI lighting, KNX for space comfort, and the BACnet of the HVAC plant and BMS. Each WBox S485 KNX exposes these points in a single OPC UA address space, consumed by the central supervision.

  • DALI ⇄ OPC UA — addressable lighting surfaced and commanded from the supervision.
  • KNX ⇄ OPC UA — see the KNX ⇄ OPC UA page.
  • BACnet ⇄ OPC UA — see the BACnet ⇄ OPC UA page.

The routing table carries any point from one bus to another — with no intermediate PLC and no extra application gateway.

Solar tracking of the blinds, at the gateway

One of the WBox gateways does more than route: it continuously computes the sun’s position (azimuth and elevation) for the site’s orientation and date, and derives the optimal blind tilt — sector by sector, according to each façade’s exposure.

On-gateway logic (Blockly / JavaScript) also handles the weather alarms: on a wind threshold or rain detection, the blinds of the affected sector retract automatically to protect the installation, then resume tracking once the alert clears.

Everything runs on the gateway, with no server and no cloud dependency: blind management keeps working even if the supervision is offline.

Hardware & deployment

50× WBox S485 KNX — gateway with on-board KNX TP interface, the DALI, KNX, BACnet and OPC UA drivers licence-activated, plus the logic module for solar tracking. A uniform fleet, configured and supervised centrally.

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