English (United States)
Call us! 512-349-0334 or (877) INDUSOFT

Monday, March 5, 2001

Web Studio 4.1 Supports Wireless Communications

AUSTIN, TEXAS — March 5, 2001 — Version 4.1 of Web Studio, Indusoft's HMI and SCADA system, now supports all available wireless networks for industrial applications, including Short Message Service (SMS) for sending alarms to phones and pagers; Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), the de facto standard for presentation and delivery to mobile phones and other wireless terminals; and IEEE 802.11B. When other wireless methods are standardized for industrial use, such as Imode and GPRS (general packet radio service), InduSoft will support those services as well.

Web Studio is a powerful, integrated collection of automation tools that includes all the building blocks needed to develop human machine interfaces (HMIs), supervisory control and data acquistion (SCADA) systems, and embedded instrumentation and control applications. Web Studio runs in native Windows CE 3.0, NT, and 2000 environments and conforms to industry standards such as Microsoft DNA, OPC, DDE, ODBC, XML, SOAP and ActiveX.

To help OEMs or end users develop a system, Web Studio provides a real-time graphical interface that makes it easy to drop in the necessary modules for automating and controlling devices such as motor drives, valve actuators, pumps and motion control systems, or to set up a batch or continuous process control system with PID and advanced algorithms, or to integrate discrete and continuous controls in the same package.

Because Web Studio conforms to all the necessary Microsoft standards, it can easily interface to specialty software packages such as SoftPLC for software-based PLC controls, Think & Do and Steeplechase for flowchart-based control, ISaGRAF, and similar systems. In such cases, Web Studio provides the HMI, data acquisition and communications functions for the specialty controllers.

A Web Studio control system can migrate upward from an embedded, diskless CE 3.0 instrumentation controller to a large-scale NT-based supervisory or distributed control system. This allows an OEM to use the same software across a family of products ranging from discrete devices with embedded software to large scale, networked systems such as compressor trains, transfer machines or a family of process control instrumentation and controls. For end users, it means they can standardize on a single software package that can meet their needs for everything in the plant from a simple oven control to a complex distillation tower or batch reactor.

Web Studio supports communications drivers for the majority of PLCs and smart devices from manufacturers such as Allen-Bradley, Siemens and Fanuc, and it supports standard protocols such as DeviceNet, ControlNet, Profibus and Ethernet. It also supports Ethernet and exports graphics, recipe data and real-time data in the XML format, so it can communicate with handheld PDAs and laptop PCs via wireless, desktop or industrial computers via networks, and mainframe computers over the Internet.

The basic software package has been used for at least ten years in North America, Europe and South America. It is licensed by OEMs all over the world, including Bosch, Fluke and Xycom.

About InduSoft

Founded in 1997, InduSoft provides a powerful family of industrial software products for developing applications in process supervision, automation and control for Windows 2000, NT and CE operating systems. Today, InduSoft is developing tools and technologies to empower people and companies to develop graphical interfaces, integrate Web browsers, and take advantage of Internet connectivity. More than 4,000 InduSoft HMI, SCADA, control and data acquisition systems are operating worldwide.

Documents to download