November 8, 2005
The prime consultant is meeting this Wednesday with city purchasing for approval to advertise the Phase I RTU and HMI request for proposals. It will need to be advertised for at least three consecutive weeks. The soonest this can be evaluated and awarded is probably 3 months from now. They are planning a future meeting to discuss the details of changes requested by the city that will affect the Phase II installing contractor.
The existing RTU manufacturer is likely to have in our hand this week the completed Modbus firmware revisions, allowing us to get a sample pump station completely up and running on the new SCADA system next week. Hopefully this RTU to SCADA communication checkout will get done before our project engineer is scheduled to leave on a two-week vacation!
The phone/PDA device running Windows Mobile 5.0 we ordered for testing has never arrived – we need to follow up with carrier on that one. We did, however, prove we can display a simple HTML page from our recommended HMI on a common Verizon cell phone. Recent “Wall Street Journal” accounts of the state of the cell phone industry indicate providers are running toward providing Web services, Wi-Fi, music, TV and other functionality in your cell phone. We are convinced it will only be a few years before maintenance personnel’s use of a cell phone to maintain their systems becomes common.
