Does Easy BACnet support MS/TP or RS-485?

Q: Does Easy BACnet support MS/TP or RS-485?

No — not directly, and not at this time. Easy BACnet talks BACnet IP over your phone's Wi-Fi or a USB-Ethernet adapter. A phone has no RS-485 serial port, so the app cannot plug into or read an MS/TP (RS-485) trunk on its own. It can see MS/TP devices when they are routed onto the IP network by a BACnet router — you reach them through the router, not by wiring into the serial bus.

Updated 18 September 2026

Short answer

No — not directly, and not at this time. Easy BACnet talks BACnet IP over your phone's Wi-Fi or a USB-Ethernet adapter. A phone has no RS-485 serial port, so the app cannot plug into or read an MS/TP (RS-485) trunk on its own. It can see MS/TP devices when they are routed onto the IP network by a BACnet router — you reach them through the router, not by wiring into the serial bus.

The short version

Easy BACnet is a BACnet IP browser and control tool. It does two things with MS/TP:

Direct MS/TP / RS-485 connection: not supported. The app does not speak to a serial trunk, and there is no plan for a phone to do so — phones have no RS-485 hardware.
Routed MS/TP over IP: supported. If a BACnet router (or a controller with a built-in router) advertises its MS/TP devices onto BACnet IP, those devices appear in a scan and you can read and command them through the router. Easy BACnet shows their routed network number and MAC so you can tell them apart from native IP devices.

We would rather state this plainly than have you discover it in a plant room: if the only path to your controllers is a bare RS-485 MS/TP trunk with no router onto IP, Easy BACnet cannot reach them, and no phone app can. You need a device that bridges MS/TP onto the IP network first.

Why a phone can't touch MS/TP directly

MS/TP runs over an RS-485 serial pair — two or three wires, a token passed from device to device. BACnet IP runs over the ordinary data network on UDP 47808. They are the same language on completely different wiring. Reading MS/TP directly needs an RS-485 serial interface, which phones do not have and which a laptop only gets with a dedicated USB-to-RS-485 adapter and MS/TP software. Easy BACnet stays on the IP side on purpose: it is the side a phone can actually reach.

How to reach MS/TP devices anyway

Through the router they already sit behind. Most buildings put a BACnet router (often part of a supervisory controller or gateway) between the MS/TP trunks and the IP backbone. If yours does, those MS/TP devices are already on IP as far as your phone is concerned — scan and they show up.
Confirm a router exists. If a whole set of controllers is missing from a scan and they are known to be MS/TP, ask whoever owns the controls whether those trunks are routed onto IP, and where the router is. That is a controls / BMS question, not a network or app one.

Might direct MS/TP come later?

Not for the phone app — the hardware limit is real. The honest answer is that Easy BACnet is, and is meant to be, a BACnet IP tool. If you need to sit on a serial trunk directly, that is a job for a laptop with an RS-485 adapter and purpose-built MS/TP software.