Thursday, October 19, 2006

Wireless There was some questioning around ISA Expo about whether Emerson and/or Dust Networks would create a proprietary cost of entry barrier to the new wireless network announced by them this month. I've done some asking (and I'm not negotiating anything for anybody, so don't have details) and the answer is no. One executive from Emerson told me that they want lots of people to deliver wireless products. The rising market will float all the boats. In fact the Hart booth demonstrated prototypes of interoperability from 8 vendors. So that should all be good for the users. 3:42:21 PM    comment []

SP 100 update The last I heard about the SP 100 committee yesterday was that the meetings didn't get started until yesterday afternoon, and at 2 PM they were still discussing the agenda. Evidently they got around to business. I just received a press release from ISA (8:45 am, local time) with news from the committee. Seems they have decided to merge the two working groups (SP100.11 covering industrial process measurement and control and SP100.14 focusing on industrial monitoring). The new working group is SP100.11a and will be chaird by Dan Sexton of GE Research and Pat Kinney of Kinney Consultants LLC. The scope of the consolidated effort will define the OSI layer specifications (e.g. PHY, DLL, etc), security specifications, and management (including network and device configuration) specifications for wireless devices serving the Class 1 through 5 industrial environment with some attention to Class 0 for fixed, portable and moving devices. It is the intent of this project to work toward a level of coexistence with other wireless devices anticipated in the industrial work space, such as 802.11x, 802.16x, cell phones, and more. The group also intends to work to a level of interoperability with communication networks anticipated in the industrial work space, such as 802.3, 802.11x, 802.16x, HART, and others. According to the release, "We are all very encouraged by the similarity and compatibility of the ideas submitted for enabling us to move forward so rapidly towards a converged architecture for the standard. There is a wealth of industry experience within the committee and a desire among users and vendors to work toward an optimal solution that will satisfy user needs worldwide," added ISA SP100 committee co-chair Richard Sanders of Exxon Mobil. 9:53:40 AM    comment []

Industrial Ethernet Speaking of Ethernet, that is another hot topic at ISA Expo--just not the hype. I mentioned Phoenix Contact and its growing line of industrially hardened Ethernet switches and routers. There's another company moving aggressively into the market -- Moxa. With a new US management team, it is also marketing a line of industrial Ethernet switches. Lots of good options for engineers and manufacturing IT people as they implement Ethernet in the factory. 9:40:19 AM    comment []

Succession at Opto 22 Now that I'm off my soapbox (I don't want to sound like another editor), I had a nice chat with Benson Hougland, marketing vice president of Opto 22, yesterday. He presented a conference session on Ethernet I/O and told me that it was well attended. Just shows the growing popularity of Ethernet (a ubiquitous standard, by the way, that allows anyone to innovate on top of it without fear of lawsuits or exorbitant cost). I was pleased to learn that Mark Engman has assumed the roles of president and CEO of Opto, taking over for his father--Opto founder Bob Engman. Mark is a quiet guy, but very smart. Maybe I'll be able to get him to open up a little on today's technology issues for a future podcast (hint). Mark has headed Opto's engineering function for several years. 9:35:48 AM    comment []

ISA Expo Day Two Day two at ISA Expo--more "attendees" that is, people without exhibitor or press badges. There was some energy that could be felt--and a lot of conversations. Happening. On the announcement side of things, the word of the day seemed to be "redundancy." Both Siemens and Moore Industries (Moore Hawke) showed examples of redundant wiring for fieldbus systems. I heard one of the best basic descriptions of a fieldbus network since my first DeviceNet training in the mid-90s at the Moore press conference. The presentation probably glazed the eyes of non-technical reporters and others in the room, but I thought it was well done. (Breaking a long-standing tradition, I sat in the front of the room so I couldn't watch all the other people, too.) The deeper I dig into the wireless issue, the messier it gets. I received an introduction into the transport protocol layer yesterday. Very basically--there is the radio layer analogous to "Cat 5" wiring for Ethernet. Then there is what I'll call the transport protocol layer (known as the "stack"). Then applications (Hart, for instance) run on top of that. People are settling for either IEEE 802.11 (wifi) radios or IEEE 802.15.4 (mesh) radios. The catch is in the protocol layer. There is an "industry standard" called ZigBee. But the ZigBee members (and others) all maintain their own proprietary stack. What this means is--if it's a standard, then it's a published specification that can usually be downloaded for free or for a nominal charge. If it's proprietary, then it's for sale--usually at a much larger price. So, if I'm a device manufacturer, for example, and I'd like to build a transmitter that will play in a network such as Emerson Process Management just announced, then I'll have to go to it and purchase the stack that it has purchased from Dust. This is not like the cost of entry for, say, Foundation Fieldbus. Therefore, the problem for ISA SP100, the committee trying to forge an industry and then eventually a formal standard. Not only do they argue about mesh versus point-to-point radios, but these protocols get messy as well. Dust's executives have told me that they've offered their stack to Hart and SP100 to form the basis of their standards (I don't know any financial details, but it sounds like a nominal -not prohibitive- fee). But since this protocol forms the foundation for Emerson's system, and since Emerson owns a large market share in North America for field devices, company politics creeps in. Not to mention those members who seek 100 percent assurance about reliability, determinism, and security issues. So, the more I learn, the more pessimistic I become about the eventual success of SP100. I keep hoping that the rational people on the committee prevail over the religious ones. But then you get the pragmatists that just want things to work and be easy for their customers. National Instruments just went out to all the wirless suppliers and built drivers in LabView for a bunch of them. Hmmm, interoperability in the software--that's an interesting idea. 7:20:28 AM    comment []