News

Early this week we got our fingers out from the keyboard for a few days and visited the Hannover Messe 2012. As you probably know, the Hannover Messe is one of the world's most important automation technology events. The fair was just fantastic, almost all big companies in the automation industry were showcasing their latest devices and software.

There were tons of new stuff, however, there is still nothing even similar to ScadaMobile. Moreover, HMI solutions are still as ugly as they were in the 90s, what encourages us to continue thinking in expanding the ScadaMobile family. Many of our users are asking for a full HMI solution for the iPad. For now, all we can say is that the oven is not empty. Be prepared, because what we have in the labs already rocks, and it is not even in beta.

Although not particularly interested in hardware, we did not lose the occasion of talking with the different manufacturers to know what they think about our platform. We have good news here too. In the next months, we will be partnering some companies to offer specific ScadaMobile apps for their platforms and customers.

With all it has been a great week. In just a few days we have settled the future of the many changes that will come to the ScadaMobile platform in the next months. Stay in touch, you will not regret!

Following user feedback requests we enhanced our apps with a couple of new features that would help advanced integrators to make use of the ScadaMobile app along with other apps, and to allow a more comprehensive use of the Audio Player feature.

Particularly, the app now supports URL Schemas. Any iOS application (including mobile Safari) that opens an URL starting with 'scadamobile://' will automatically launch the ScadaMobile application. This can be useful when designing sophisticated native or web applications that would want to launch the ScadaMobile app as a consequence of a a given event in order to perform a custom action with a PLC, and as a way to provide open PLC access from applications that do not support natively such feature.

Additionally, we have enhanced the Formula-ONE.csv example to demonstrate a way to start/stop the audio player programmatically, for example after a PLC value change, so that you can effectively configure the SM app to enable a PLC to play custom music.

The latest Formula-ONE.csv example demonstrating this feature is available for download from the downloads section.

Currently the app is in version 2.1.7. Among other things, this version also solves a glitch with the Login screen when using communication alerts and fixes an issue with the $SMPulse1s system variable.

A few hours ago we got approval for version 2.1.5. This version is a maintenance update solving several issues with the alarms engine and the new audio player feature. It also incorporates a fix for the bit access problem that was introduced on version 2.1.4. See our Release Notes section for further information.

Just after Version 2.1.4 of our apps were made available to the App Store some users reported a serious issue affecting bit accesses on PLC tags. As a quick measure we decided to remove this version from the App Store until a solution is provided. More info is posted on the release notes section.

We strongly recommend to not download the referred version (2.1.4) until further note. Please keep checking the site for updates on this subject. We apologize for the inconveniences and really appreciate the quick feedback that users have given to us regarding this issue.

Thanks.

We are pleased to announce immediate availability of the release version 2.1.3 of our apps. This release incorporates several features based on user requests and also fixes several issues based on user feedback.

We are thrilled we finally got Apple authorization for running the app in the background for unlimited periods of time. That's excellent news. Now users will be able to keep tracking their processes and alarms without having to worry about any time limitation. We are sure many users will be as happy as we are about having this feature at hand.

The ability to play audio files and to combine them with particular alarms or other conditions was a very common feature request and we are sure it will be very appreciated by a lot of users. We think that we implemented this in such a flexible way that advanced users and integrators will be delighted about it.

We have updated the Release Notes section with a detailed description of this particular release. The updated user's manual is already available for download (Download Link).

We can't wait to start receiving feedback about this release.

We are pleased to announce the imminent release of a new update of our ScadaMobile and Modbus Gem apps. The new version 2.1.2 addresses some issues that users reported and brings improved support of devices featuring multicore processors, such as the iPad II and the iPhone 4S, through a more extensive use of multithreading throughout the app.

Particularly, the app now keeps updating tag values while the user is scrolling the interface, thus providing an enhanced user experience and faster perceived access to data. The app also allows for choosing the desired PLC polling rate, which can be set to a much faster value than the default 2 seconds, with a very noticeable effect on responsible networks.

An old requested feature was the ability to display custom documents based on PLC values. This request has been incorporated to this version and new tag attributes give integrators the ability to display any kind of documents previously stored in the app sandbox or dynamically fetched from internet servers, as well as to present web sites, based on user interaction or condition changes in the app including PLC tag value changes.

As part of the update some specific examples for the ONE version have been revised to prevent user lookup table conflicts when opened all at the same time.

Finally, new users that found the ScadaMobile ONE version missing from the App Store over the last couple of weeks will have it available again for free download coinciding with the release of this update.

Currently, this release is under review by Apple and we expect it to be available in the following days. An updated user manual will be available for download from our site in a couple of days and we are also updating the release notes section to reflect latest changes.

We just uploaded to the app store a new version of our ScadaMobile and ScadaMobile ONE apps. This is a maintenance update (App Version 2.1.1) that addresses several issues some users reported on the latest release, mostly related with the recent addition of Siemens S7 support.

As usual, we are covering this on the site's Release Notes section in a more comprehensive way.

Following Apple review, this update should be available for download in several of days.

Today we got our apps in version 2.1 approved and submitted to the App Store. We have updated some sections of the site with more info about this release. Most significantly the Release Notes section now features this version.

We are pleased to announce immediate availability of ScadaMobile 2.1 featuring native support for Siemens Simatic S7 Controllers including S7-1200, S7-300 and S7-400.

ISO-8073 (RFC2126) drivers for communications with Simatic S7 controllers have been implemented from scratch and fully integrated with the app's features, just behaving as any of the supported protocols. For example, fully optimized communications frames are automatically generated for efficient data retrieval with low network traffic.

Supported memory areas are: 'M', 'MB', 'MW', 'MD'; 'I', 'IB', 'IW', 'ID' (or the equivalent 'E' if using German notation prefix) ; 'Q', 'QB', 'QW', 'QD' (or 'A' for German notation); and DBn.DBX, DBn.DBB, DBn.DBW, DBn.DBD

S7 Strings and Arrays are fully supported as well and incorporated into the app for seamless integration with the app expressions engine.

As part of the update we have also moved not only the communications drivers but also the whole communications engine into a fully multithreaded architecture. This brings optimal execution on multicore processors and takes advantage of the newest dual core processors available in iPad 2 and iPhone 4S devices. The result is an even more responsible app when used on these devices.

Other additions in this release include:

- Support for Front Camera and Zoom on Bar Code Reader.

- Color attributes are now available on Switch and Slider controls too (iOS5 only).

- Several user interface and usability improvements and additions (some iOS5 only).

We are now updating the users's manual to reflect the new features and we expect to have it ready in a couple of days.

The updated apps (ScadaMobile ONE 2.1 and ScadaMobile 2.1 ) are currently being reviewed by Apple for submission to the App Store.

Over the last few days two new versions have been posted to the App Store. Version 2.0.2 adds support for international encodings (Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic and so on) including the ability to store strings using these encodings in PLCs. Refer to the user's manual for a discussion on this. Version 2.0.3 adds support for reversed byte strings in modbus devices. A new attribute str_byte_swap has been added to deal with it.