I reported yesterday about the fantastic performance of the NIVIS gateway and the Software Technology Group field device and the MACtek Bullet WirelessHART Adaptor on Monday evening.

Last night, at the 20th anniversary reception at the HART General Meeting, an amazing thing happened. It wasn't planned, it just happened, and it serves notice that the WirelessHART standard is much more mature in its behavior than we thought.

NIVIS was demonstrating their WirelessHART stack and WirelessHART gateway. That was planned. They had two "field device" demos, a gateway and a MACtek "bullet" WirelessHART Adaptor in a network that was operating just fine.

Far from being an "emerging standard" (which is the way I'd describe ISA100.11a) the WirelessHART and HART 7 "ecosystem" (as we are now told we have to call the vendor supply chain systems) appears to be growing and flourishing at an astonishing rate. There are over 30 companies engaged right now in bringing WirelessHART products to market. Challenges are being met, like bringing down the cost of producing firmware and radios, gateways, and adaptors.

What do I mean?

The WirelessHART Radio Stack