Ok, I admit it. I've been traveling for several weeks now, and I am tired and grumpy. But maybe that's why I have almost lost patience with the wireless industrial field device standards war.
Regardless of what you have heard, the war is still in full swing. And it really ought to stop.
Emerson is now moving to its second generation of WirelessHART devices (see the Rosemount 708 acoustic transmitter for an example) while E+H, ABB, Siemens, Pepperl+Fuchs, Phoenix Contact, MacTek and others are releasing all their WirelessHART products as soon as they can shove them through the FCC, the HART Foundation and FM, UL or CSA. This accounts for about 85% of the field devices made, by the way.
Emerson alone claims over 1400 different locations where their WirelessHART devices are installed, with over 200,000,000 operating hours to date. Emerson is now regularly booking multi-million-dollar orders for WirelessHART systems.
WirelessHART has been proven for control, and has both analog and digital I/O capability now. Emerson released this week redundant devices and gateways for WirelessHART, and "control on the wire" has been tested though not yet released, and safety systems using wireless are just over the horizon. All of these things and more are in the HART 7 Standard, so don't believe it when they tell you that WirelessHART is in any way inferior. It works, and has been proven to work.
And we're trying to achieve "convergence" between WirelessHART (IEC 62591), the only global industrial wireless field device standard, and the stillborn ISA100.11a-2009, which ISA withdrew from consideration at ANSI early this year.
This entire convergence effort is silly, because the ISA100 committee, instead of waiting for convergence (ISA100.12) to be achieved, has gone ahead and started to prepare the substantially different ISA100.11a-2010 to be submitted to the Standards and Practices Board at ISA, and then to ANSI.
So we, on the ".12" committee are attempting to wring convergence with a dead letter. This, as I said, is silly.
Even though the "Convergence RFP" has been voted on (and I assume it passed, although ISA has not yet announced the vote) there is no guarantee that a convergence proposal that will actually work will come out of the effort.
And, frankly, I think we ought to quit. The market is speaking very loudly now. People are refusing to wait for ISA to get their standard out. WirelessHART, being an IEC global standard, has pretty much won. It's all over but the treating of the wounded, folks.
So if you are on the WirelessHART side in this stupid fight, congratulate yourselves. If you are not, you might want to see what you have to do to get out of the mess ISA is in.
And this is a sad time for ISA, as the ISA100 fiasco has drawn into question the continuation of ISA as a nonpartial consensus standard-making body.
