标签: industrial

About a year ago, when people started discussing the impact the emerging Internet of Things would have on existing industrial control networks, one company I kept a close eye on was Echelon Corp . The company's introduction in January of its IzoT platform for the Industrial Internet of Things and then last March of the "IzoT-in-a-box," have not been a disappointment. Given its history, the company gets a lot of "street cred" with me for anything to do with the emerging IIoT. The company was founded in 1988 by Armas Clifford "Mike" Markkula, one of Intel Corp.'s first employees, shortly after he bankrolled Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to start up Apple Computer. ( The fact that while he was at Intel Mike was often a useful resource for tips on industry trends for a young technology journalist made me pay attention even then to what he was doing at Echelon. ) Since then, the company and its pioneering Lonworks control network protocol has had as profound an effect on industrial, building automation, and smart grid networking as Apple has had on personal computing and mobile devices. Echelon's LonWorks platform for control networking was released in 1990 for use in the building, industrial, transportation, and home automation markets. By 2010 approximately 90 million devices were installed with its LonWorks-derived Free Topology technology. The company's Networked Energy Services system (including Smart Meters, Data Concentrators, and a head-end data collection system) currently has about 3.5 million devices installed worldwide. The LonTalk communications protocol is a standard for control networking (ANSI/CEA-709.1-B) as is its power line and twisted pair signalling technology. Lonworks is also the basis for IEEE 1473-L (in-train controls), AAR electro-pneumatic braking systems for freight trains, IFSF (European petrol station control), SEMI (semiconductor equipment manufacturing), and as a part of the EN 14908 European building automation standard. The protocol is also one of several data link/physical layers in the BACnet ASHRAE/ANSI standard for building automation. That protocol is now at the heart of Echelon's IzoT Industrial Internet of Things framework, detailed here in a two-part article . At a time when everyone else is still talking and trying to sort out the complexities, Echelon is already here with a well thought out plan to extend its its Free Topology into the tangled web of interactions the Industrial IoT implementation could become if not done carefully. Last March Echelon has taken the next step in establishing IzoT as a de facto standard with the introduction this week of the FT 6000 Evaluation and Development Kit (aka 'IzoT In a Box').   Targeted at developers who are creating, testing, and deploying devices and control applications for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the FT 6000 EVK packages the essential elements of Echelon's IzoT platform into an aggressively priced and easy-to-use kit for developers looking to create wired devices using the ISO 14908-compatible Free Topology (FT) technology. The FT 6000 EVK 'IzoT in a Box' includes evaluation boards based on the FT 6050 System-on-Chip (SoC), a router to connect the FT-based device network to Ethernet, development tools to develop devices and applications on the boards, and software to commission and manage the device network. With the EVK, developers can create devices that support multiple protocols and that are backward-compatible with LonWorks and BACnet device networks. The two Evaluation Boards (EVBs) with FT 6050 SoCs include a comprehensive set of inputs and outputs (I/O) as well as simple sensors and actuators for prototyping the IIoT device and device communities..Also included is the IzoT NodeBuilder software for developing and testing embedded device software on the EVBs or on the custom device, as well as Echelon's Commissioning Tool/EVK Edition for installing and managing EVB-based or custom devices and device network. Frankly, given the still nascent state of most competitive IIoT efforts, at this time I believe Echelon's IzoT-In-A-Bpx is the best way for designers of industrial control networks to move from a wired to a wireless or mixed wired/wireless IIoT in a cost-effective and reliable way. Wired control networks are not going away. And Lonworks and the Free Topology is in almost 100 million of them. And that segment is still growing. According to market analysts at IHS, wired connections will continue to account for more than 50 per cent of all IIoT connections. Given that, a multi-drop IP network based on the Free Topology is likely to be the best way to go, versus either RS 485 or Ethernet, especially given that devices developed using the FT 6050 can be backward-compatible with LonWorks and BACnet device networks. The FT 6000 EVK will begin shipping in the next few months for about $895. It can now be ordered online at store.echelon.com.  

James Kwak, a law professor and not a software engineer, recently wrote a piece that is making waves in the blogosphere with the alarmist title " Software Runs the World: How Scared Should We Be That So Much of It Is So Bad ?" He seizes on the recent Knight Capital debacle to petrify readers, and makes the absolutist statement " The underlying problem here is that most software is not very good. " Really? He's right that software does run the world. However, the world in many ways has never run better. Remember travel agents? Now an airplane seat is just a few clicks away. How about that encyclopedia your young parents bought before you could even read, whose spines encased information that started becoming obsolete immediately? Today much of the world's knowledge is available in your pocket on that smart phone. Then there is that phone – when I was young a long distance call was so prohibitively expensive that they were reserved for a rare business emergency or a death in the family. Today Skype gives us video chats into every corner of the world... for free. My 1966 VW needed a valve adjustment every 3000 miles, but my 2004 Prius, with 150,000 miles on it, still has the original spark plugs. TV was a handful of channels not long ago; today there are hundreds (though still populated with the same old crap) and other services deliver movies on demand. SCADA systems, though admittedly imperfect, literally control the world of industrial production. Then there's the Curiosity rover. This weekend my dad, a long-retired mechanical engineer who did many Mars landing studies, said that if he had proposed such a gutsy mission he would have been fired. But the embedded software guided the spacecraft to a very complex autonomous landing. What a triumph of software and software engineering! Ironically, Mr. Kwak lists his blogs and Twitter connections, concepts that would be impossible without software that works pretty darn well. The author writes: " The question is how much you're willing to sacrifice in the name of quality ." That is getting it exactly wrong. The entire thrust of the Deming revolution is that quality saves money. Sure, software isn't perfect. What is? Regular readers know I'm passionate about improving the quality of our software-based products, but it's important to step back occasionally and acknowledge our successes. In a single lifetime computers have gone from science fiction to the very fabric of our lives. The notion of not having hundreds of processors is today as absurd as the idea of owning any computer was forty years ago. Those machines are all quietly running software that works. And embedded code works the best of all. The data shows that firmware bug rates are about an order of magnitude lower than for PC and IT applications. So developers stand up and take a bow! The average person – and law professor – would be utterly lost if your software were to suddenly disappear.