Brad Carlberg, who chaired this year’s Wireless track at Automation Week in Mobile also recorded all the sessions as well so you are now able to get the benefit of both presenter and presentation at the following link http://www.isa.org/~pupid/ISA_AW2011_Sessions.htm

In less than 1 week (July 27 -28) a wide range of experts will be in Houston at the Westlake Club to discuss how passive sensors (similar to RFID) will be used in the future.

Hello from St Louis! Just wrapping up a week of ISA symposium and meetings before heading home for a month and my list of summer yard chores.

Attention end users! This one is for you.  You get the kinds of products that you are willing to insist on.

One of the big problems in convergence between the international wireless field device standard, IEC62591-WirelessHART and the as yet unapproved ISA100.11a-2011 proposed standard is the fact that ISA100 does not mandate a basic Application Profile that all vendors' products must contain. Essentially, this means that there is no check or balance that makes interoperability and interchangeability automatic.

I have just returned from the 25th IFPAC conference in Baltimore in part to renew my Process Analyser roots and acquaintances but mostly to see how the technology has evolved in the past few years and has expected it has migrated to smaller, faster, smarter minimally invasive instruments -minimally invasive meaning spectroscopy.

While attending the WirelessHART seminar a while back we had a discussion about potential vulnerabilities and challenges with Wireless devices in classified areas and surprisingly or upon further consideration maybe not so much of a surprise, one of the real challenges faced by manufacturers is how to make the antenna explosion proof. When you think about it, an antenna is really an extension of the circuit (a wire) outside the explosion proof enclosure and hence an electrical path across the explosion proof boundary.

Oakridge National Laboratory is hosting the above workshop November 8 – 10 at their facilities in Oakridge Tennessee with the intent of focusing on the Future of Instrumentation.

Control's 2010 HART Supplement is ready for you.

Control's August issue is now online and ready for viewing.

In the August Issue of Control, Editor in Chief Walt Boyes outlines where we are now with wireless--the standards wars, the technologies and why some folks are avoiding wireless regardless. For another don't-miss read, see our special edition of Ask the Experts, where Bela Liptak talks on the BP blow-up--what was done and what should have been done. All this, plus how one company is saving money and time with a new clean-in-place solution for its tanker trucks and the latest on NeSSi.

ISA announced a couple of days ago that a whole group of Honeywell and Yokogawa instruments and devices had completed WCI-compliance testing and were now certified ISA100.11a devices. That's cool.

Or is it?

Which ISA100.11a were these devices certified against?

ISA100.11a-2009, which was withdrawn from the ANSI approval process?

ISA100.11a-2010, which is being re-written with some significant changes from the 2009 model year and hasn't been approved yet?