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.

A new white paper on the uses of mesh networking in ISA100.11a Draft 2 has been posted in the ControlGlobal.com white paper library. Read the white paper:

http://www.controlglobal.com/whitepapers/2008/200.html

65C/506A/PAS Project: IEC/PAS 62591 Ed.1 IEC/PAS 62591: Industrial communication networks - Fieldbus spec

First, the ISA100 leadership rushes out a draft standard after the editorial team "handles" over 2000 technical comments in less than 98 days (including weekends and holidays).

Now they want to teach us how to design an ISA100 Compliant product.

Can you say "Chutspah?" Boys and Girls?

Here's a press release received this evening:

I am sure this will anger some people, but I also think others will be moving their heads up and down, and others might even be cheering me on. Somebody has to say these things, or the situation will never improve.

...

HONEYWELL’S NEW ONEWIRELESS RELEASE IS ISA100-READY

OneWireless Extends the Process Control Network

ISA released another press release yesterday in the run-up to the current draft ballot comment period for the ISA100.11a draft standard.

Even though the .11a Working Group has many months of work to go to produce a buildable standard, and there may not be enough votes to pass the standard at this point, the Compliance Institute appears to be going ahead and planning its work based on the standard as it currently exists. Based on the time tables described in the release, the Compliance Institute...

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...

It is so important, both to Dick Caro and to me that we get this exactly right, that Dick's article has been subjected to one of the most intense editing processes I've ever put an article through. Comments were solicited from everybody involved in both SP100 and the HART Communication Foundation. Facts were checked and re-checked by me, by Dick, and by the editorial team. We think we're done.

We've also tried very hard to not inject any hint of personal bias into this article. I took out some ...