Is the world ready for a “self-help” supplier of industrial networking tools and equipment? The people at Cobaltprocess (www.cobaltprocess.com) in the Northwest USA certainly hope so.

The original network analysis tool was the National Instruments Bus Monitor, developed at approximately the same time as Foundation Fieldbus was being introduced. This tool was designed to monitor the data traffic on fieldbus networks. It was not until Relcom introduced the FBT-3 that a physical layer troubleshooting tool specific for Fieldbus was available. Prior to the FBT-3 the only options were multimeter and oscilloscope, with no way of knowing which devices were communicating when a signal trace went by.

Japan based organization Mechatrolink’s (http://www.mechatrolink.org/en/index_en.html)  Safety Working Group completed a list of specifications  satisfied the requirements of IEC61508 safety integrity level SIL3 for the communications protocol of the MECHATROLINK field network that meets safety standards. TÜV Rheinland, certified the documents in August this year released their Safety bus.

The Fieldbus Foundation announced that it has established a new blog addressing a wide range of issues affecting the world of FOUNDATION technology.

Control's 2010 HART Supplement is ready for you.

Wireless is being proposed as the easiest and lowest cost way to install additional infrastructure between a field device and the control system when the home run cable is ‘full.’ Unfortunately, this is not true since as the title implies another alternative exists and that alternative can be used in any area classification. The solution is Fieldbus.

"After fifteen years, we can emphatically say that the technology works," John Berra, wearing his hat as Chairman of the Fieldbus Foundation Board of Directors, said in his welcome to the Fieldbus Foundation General Assembly.

I had the opportunity to attend the Fieldbus Foundation Seminar in Vancouver last week and was not only pleasantly surprised by the turn out, some folks drove up from Seattle, but more importantly the fact that several EPC companies were represented. This was the second of the 2010 North America seminar series and next up is St. Louis in April.

Here we go, the most challenging of all steps is the first one so I will start safe (baby steps concept) by sharing with you the topics I hope to cover in this blog:

Nothing Shakespearean or tragic about this. Just a snip from Andrew Bond's latest INSIDER report on testing of Foundation fieldbus technology in Glasgow. Here's what Andrew reports: