It has been five months since the last update and the long
duration between updates is not due to inactivity.
Support for strings in a PLC5 via DF1 was added. Via PCCC has existed for some time.
An Enron RTU over TCP driver was added. We added Enron serial (RTU) and Enron TCP/IP about five months ago. Enron RTU over TCP is the Enron RTU (same as serial) protocol using TCP/IP as the transport protocol. This allows devices that are only Enron RTU serial to be accessed with a hardware serial to Ethernet/TCP device or a virtual serial to TCP driver.
The big feature in the works; coding has been under way to allow a user to draw and animate graphics in the HMI graphic editor and the runtime graphic engine generate output that can be accessed via a web browser.
The HMI has been able to display dynamic data in web browsers for a few years. The first method used; the HMI created, on demand, HTML web pages that were list of tags and data values, as well as screen captures of the graphic windows. Next addition was the ability to parse HTML files seeking markers to replace with data values from tag data, allowing custom HTML pages to be used.
Now, with the adoption of HTML5, by many browsers, the HMI can convert graphic elements into HTML5/JavaScript/CSS (three languages web browsers understand) and update the graphic elements with data from the HMI, via HTTP, continuously.
This new addition provides a draw it, animate it, and use it in a web browser feature. Any web browser that supports HTML5 is the design target.
In the current HMI release the new “Website” feature is supported and marked as beta. So anyone can try it. This new feature will soon be released and more additions are planned.
The older method, on demand dynamic web pages, will be deprecated.
