Changing the Good Oil Remotely - Foxboro Evo Maintain on the SCD2200



Design Variations can hinder operation and maintenance

Occasionally developers find it useful to add enhancements to a product, adding some esoteric variation and new set of use cases.  This can happen often with systems level products, oweing to the almost infinite variety of NEW NEW end user configurations which can be achieved.

 

Toward the end of last week on my return to Australia, I visited Bondi Beach in Sydney and took the pilgrimage around the headland which was hosting the annual 'Sculptures by the Sea' event.  There among the hundred odd sculptures scattered around the cliff walk was a car which had been shall we say 'enhanced' by the addition of various pipes and structures.  The topology of the thing would definitely give your average maintenance technician a headache, probably which could only be resolved by a swim with the sharks or a welding torch.

 

It was a beautiful artwork with rusty piping invading a reasonably modern vehicle [See photo]. Sculpture is a great way to mess with your mind of course.

 

We've done that ourselves with some of our own releases of new Systems products where the product can get just that bit too complex to maintain, having to take it apart or send it back to the factory to get 'reset' as it were when the end user or engineer does something out of sequence or something just plain sensible with a bad result.

Foxboro SCD2200

 

From July our developers were hard at work trying to sort out exactly how to manage remote download and maintenance of the Foxboro SCD2200 without compromising its overall operation and availability.  Finally it seems they have cracked the code and got the good oil into the firmware in the recent version 5 release.

 

In SCADA systems we try to avoid anything interfering with the Remote Terminal Unit's ability to be able to handle a remote download and online restart of a new configuration. Unfortunately we had some issues with an older version of our download software which have been corrected and improved in the latest release of the SCD2200 RTU firmware. Version 5 has been released just now and is shipping on all subsequent deployments of the SCD2200 RTU. Almost immediately after providing the release to an existing site, our site support teams remotely upgraded 60 redundant RTUs which included migrating databases and applications and re-starting all RTUs without a hitch.

 

For our RTU products we generally provide Quick Fix type releases to rapidly ease any issues on site and then provide maintenance releases periodically [6 month to 1 year] to collectively resolve all issues discovered as well as bring forward limited amounts of new functionality. The relatively new enhancements to the SCD2200 firmware in the new Version 5 are listed below.  Further details of bug fixes and resolutions are to be found in the release notes.

 

For more information on the latest release, please contact your Foxboro representative.

 

 Photo : Christolograph: Flickr - Attrib CC. - Sculptures by the Sea, Bondi 2013.
Sculpture by Sam Deal 'Variation'

 

New Features in the SCD2200 Version 5

1.1 DNP3 Master

The DNP3 Master communication is supported on the CP-3 and MC-31 modules through the different media types; RS-232, RS-485, UDP, and TCP/IP. The DNP3 Master configured in one SCD2200 can communicate with a DNP3 Slave configured in another SCD2200.

1.2 Improved Firmware Download Process

 

The steps to download are displayed clearly during the firmware download process.

 

1.2.1 Downloading Firmware

 

Firmware can be downloaded into a processor or communications module to upgrade functionality. The firmware version that is currently in the CP-3 or MC-31 can be checked using the Status command. Note that the CP-3 and MC-31 use identical firmware. When upgrading firmware, it is recommended that all CP-3 and MC-31 modules in an RTU be upgraded to the same version.

Upgrading firmware will preserve the current RTU configuration (including configured IP addresses). However, all logic will be cleared, as will all event logs.