The ballot for the current draft of ISA100.11a failed of receiving its required two-thirds majority to pass. The draft will be returned to the Working Group, along with the comments received, and we will do another round.

I am pleased and proud of the ISA100 community for recognizing that science and engineering are more important than money and politics. We now have a chance to put together the standard the way it ought to have been done.

We might even be able to integrate WirelessHART into Draft 3.

Here's to the sudden outbreak of sanity.

HONEYWELL’S NEW ONEWIRELESS RELEASE IS ISA100-READY

OneWireless Extends the Process Control Network

ISA just released the following carefully crafted press release. It announces the creation of a WirelessHART Convergence Subcommittee.
The ISA100 standards committee on wireless systems for automation has created a new subcommittee to address options for convergence of the ISA100.11a and WirelessHART standards. 

This initiative is a key step in the mission of the ISA100 committee to develop a family of universal industrial wireless standards designed to satisfy the needs of end us...

Below you will find, unedited, the text of a press release put out by ISA, announcing that the .11a Working Group has put out a preliminary ballot on the wireless standard they've been working on.

It is extremely important when reading this press release to try to put it into context. The first draft of the standard has been released within the Working Group. This means that the members of the working group have been asked to provide comments and suggested changes to the group. This is called a...

As we did last year, Control magazine and ControlGlobal.com have teamed with the ISA100 Wireless Standard Committee to produce a major user survey on wireless.

The questions were developed in cooperation with the ISA100 Marketing Working Group and the ISA100 User Working Group, and were produced by a group of committee members including David Kaufman from Honeywell, Paul Sereiko from Airsprite Technologies, Jose Gutierrez from Emerson, Dick Caro, the User WG co-chair, and others, under the edit...

I received this letter from Rich Timoney, President and CEO of the Fieldbus Foundation. It was sent to all the voting members of ISA100. It speaks for itself.

Subject: Wireless Standardization Activities

I am writing to you today to make you awar...

I haven't been posting much about the ongoing Wireless War. There are significant reasons for this, including the fact that I am a working and voting member of ISA100, and chose to do as much as I could within the committee.

Recently, this incredibly disfunctional committee became even more so.

The story from where we left off last year goes like this. In October at the SP100 (now (ISA100) meeting at the ISA show, the entire committee voted for convergence with WirelessHART, a standard that ha...

Hearking back to the press release ISA put out last week, it appears that the first draft of the ISA100.11a standard was NOT voted out of the Task Group in China as the press release indicated it would be. There will be a delay of at least 30 days, I am told, before the Task Group votes out the draft for comment.

This, of course, makes one wonder again about the "alpha test bed" that Andr...

While the SP100 committee (or those of us that could afford to take a week, and $10,000 to do it) meets in Chongqing, China, ISA today sent out a press release extolling something that may or may not have happened yet...an interoperability demonstration of ISA100.11a instruments in China.

"Today, the ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute, with the support of General Electric, Honeywell, and Nivis, demonstrated prototype ISA100.11a wireless standard-based
products in the ISA100 booth at the 2008 ...

From the press release: 

Research Triangle Park, NC (13 March 2008) - The ISA100.11a editor team met last week at ISA headquarters in Research Triangle Park, NC. The team met to study the comments received from the review of the preliminary draft ISA100.11a standard that was conducted by members of the working group over the past few weeks.

Participants included members of the ISA100.11a working group and the ISA100 committee, all of whom were invited to attend. Several ...