April 30, 2020 – FieldComm Group, the member organization for developers of process automation instrumentation, systems and services and owner of the HART Communication Protocol, announced the availability of a software, hardware and services development platform for HART-IP enabled instruments. With an installed base over 40 million instruments, HART is a communications protocol used in process manufacturing facilities around the world. HART embraced Internet Protocol (IP) in 2009, shortly after the release of the WirelessHART protocol. Now, 2-wire Ethernet enabled solutions for field instrumentation get ready to enter the market, the time is right for HART-IP enabled wired instruments.
Based on the Raspberry PI (3B+) system and using GitHub repositories, the HART-IP Developer Kit provides a path for process instrumentation manufacturers to prototype and demonstrate high speed HART-IP instruments with minimal engineering effort. Initially configured to work with power-over-ethernet (PoE) solutions, the developer kit features a replaceable Ethernet module that will be upgraded to support 2-wire Ethernet-APL as components become available in the future. Planned upgrades also include incorporation of FieldComm Group’s OPC UA-centric Process Automation Device Information Model (PA-DIM), for interoperability with OPC UA based enterprise applications, as well as support for JSON and XML based DeviceInfo files for use with lightweight IIoT edge gateway solutions.
The HART-IP Developer Kit is currently available to both FieldComm Group members and non-members. The kit includes hardware, software access to a HART-IP server, HART-IP client and a sample EDD as well as instructions and four hours of technical support from FieldComm Group technical staff.