The following new functions and improvements are available in ibaPDA from version 8.12.0.

New CAN interface

As a successor of the ibaBM-CAN bus monitor device, the new interface ibaPDA-Interface-CAN is available for acquiring data from a CAN bus. The connection to the CAN bus is established over an external CAN-Ethernet gateway, which offers two CAN bus connectors. On ibaPDA side, only an Ethernet network interface is required. An ibaFOB card, as previously needed for the bus monitor, is not required anymore.

For more information see CAN (Controller Area Network).
New module for energy applications

There is a new module Energy aggregation available in the Analytics tab under the Virtual interface. The module calculates the amount of energy based on a power signal over a selected time interval between 1 min and 1 h.

For more information see Energy aggregation module

New module: S7-Xplorer redundant

A redundant variant of the S7-Xplorer decoder module is now available. It combines the decoder function and the ability to supply this module with data via two connections to a redundant PLC configuration.
Enhanced system information

The I/O Manager offers a new node in the General area, which provides information about the ibaPDA server computer. You can assign an Alias to the computer and add location information and a description. The information is stored in the I/O configuration file.

The Alias is also indicated in the Select server dialog on client side, which helps when looking for a certain server.
Improvements for Request-S7

The Request feature for SIMATIC S7 controllers has been optimized in some areas:

  • The IP address of ibaPDA can be configured when using ibaNet-E or S7 UDP as data path. This tells the PLC at which IP address it should send the data. Thus, it is easier to separate measured data and administrative information. A network adapter which supports multiple IP addresses is required in the ibaPDA computer.

  • On start of acquisition, the communication to the connected devices is initialized in parallel in order to reduce the start time.

  • On start of acquisition the system checks if the Request-S7 configuration has changed. If this is not the case, the request procedure will be skipped and the acquisition starts immediately.
EtherNet/IP

EtherNet/IP modules now support byte swapping (choice between big-endian and little-endian).
ibaPDA-Interface-Logix-Xplorer

Read requests can be sent in parallel to the PLC.
Unit system supported for time periods

The switching of physical units and the correspondig conversion of the values is supported for HD-Time periods. Hence, the measured values in time period tables are shown in the units of the desired system. Furthermore, the time period tables in ibaAnalyzer and ibaDaVIS adopt the unit system in their views, too.
OAuth authentication for e-mail interface

When configuring the e-mail output in the SMTP area, you can now select a provider which prefers the OAuth 2.0 protocol.
PTP time master not supported anymore

When using PTP for time synchronization ibaPDA cannot be configured as time master anymore but as time slave only. Therefore, the presence of a time master in the network to connect with is essential for ibaPDA.

ibaFOB-io, ibaFOB-io-S and ibaFOB-io-X not supported anymore

The legacy PC cards ibaFOB-io, ibaFOB-io-S and ibaFOB-io-X (in all of their variants) are not supported by the software anymore. For backward compatibility reasons it was still possible to use these cards. This is not possible anymore.