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 

As the ISA100.11a draft standard nears approval, the chorus of vendors committed to WirelessHART, at least for now, continues to swell. Last month, at Interkama, ELPRO Technologies, Emerson, Endress+Hauser, Pepperl+Fuchs and MACTek all launched WirelessHART products. ABB launched its own WirelessHART product line at its ABB Automation and Power World last month, and now, at Achema (the world's largest chemical exposition) Dust and Phoenix Contact have made a long-awaited announcement that Phoenix Contact will be making a Dust-enabled WirelessHART Gateway.

Everybody is jumping on the wireless train. Wireless is becoming either the greatest enabling technology since the PC and PLC, or an overhyped bubble ready to burst any minute. End users will now be even more confused than they already are. 

 From the press release:

At the ISA Expo 2008 Conference Planning Committee meeting this weekend, Robert Shear from Dust Networks told me how much he agreed with Nancy Bartels, who posted a great idea a few weeks ago-- that we ought to be building components for the Sims and Second Life, and other simulation games based on automation and control...and showed me somebody who's already doing it.

'Sound Off! Editors' Blog'

Dust Networks, the creator of what has become WirelessHART, has announced the first set of OEM products for WirelessHART.

These products are a complete suite for instrument vendors to WirelessHART-enable their product lines, without doing the R&D necessary to do it themselves.

Products will be available in Q1 2008.

This puts even more pressure on the SP100 committee to come to terms with the existence of WirelessHART directly in the space ISA100.11a Rev 1 is supposed to occupy.

I had cou...

Steve Toteta, new kid from Dust Networks, is talking about an economic perspective on wireless mesh networking.
His agenda:
Wireless Sensor Networking
Economic Impact
Case Studies

Self organizing and self healing mesh technology brings many things to the industrial environment. I don't believe, he said, that we're in the wild west of radio technology. That was in the early 1900s. From 1900 to 2000 there was over a trillion times improvement in spectral efficiency. He also showed a graph of decr...