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Some of the primary enhancements to the firmware of the AEPOC are presented here. A complete list of changes can be found in our user's manual.The AEPOC has recently been updated to a new 2.004 software release. This is primarily a maintenance release over the current 2.003 release to address changes to daylight savings time rules and improvements to board speed.

Changes from 2.003 to 2.004 include

  • Changes to daylight savings time defaults to reflect the latest United States changes in starting and ending date.
  • Support for 8 MHz board operation.

Changes from 2.002 to 2.003 include

  • Improvements in recovering from brown outs, power failures and other power fluctuations include increased monitoring of instances along with forcing run relays to proper states based on last known operating mode. Power failure alarm delays are increased by default one stroke. State is maintained for operator run and maintenance mode.
  • VFD and Gas Engine support is improved.
  • Support for IDAC D/A output.
  • A/D 3 and 4 handling is sped up if diagnostics aren't desired. Position input filtering is also improved for inclinometer inputs.
  • Improvements to base card generation from position switches.

Changes from 2.001 to 2.002 include

  • Improved position switch and inclinometer handling.
  • Position data smoothing cleans up cards generated from poor quality inclinometer end devices. Drift and gain adjustments correct temperature related inclinometer data problems.
  • End of stroke detection in the presence of heavily spiked position data is improved.
  • Interfaces to VFDs are provided for slow speed operation when nearly pumped off with corresponding automatic adjustment for SPM alarms.
  • Miscellaneous A/D and D/I processing is now handled on a 50 ms basis, regardless of the sampling interval for load and position data.
  • 485 polling of SDIM and SDIM/PDAM combinations is now supported.
  • Fail down commands now automatically disable period processing.
  • Many generic function registers such as miscellaneous analogs and discretes and general card shape change events can now have names and units assigned to make their operation clearer for operators.
  • Scrolling text for normal status information is now suppressed if it is in the expected state to reduce clutter.
  • Additional internal improvements, code cleanups, and yes, a few bug fixes from 2.001...

Changes from the 1.x application series to the 2.001 series

The changes to 2.001 from the latest 1.x application software code introduced some other major features of interest to current customers. These include:

  • Improved user interface features when using a hand held terminal including guided menu driven setup for commonly changed registers, setup menus for many user defined end devices, links between related registers, and textual descriptions of combination fields like the event configuration registers.
  • Embedded library functions to quickly configure the unit for certain tasks.
  • Summary registers describe basic information about the most recent stored card of each type allowing you to compare pump off areas, loads, work, A/D values, etcetera between cards without pulling cards.
  • Support for additional load cells and Zap-Stix
  • Increased alarm and warning capabilities such as percent run time and an additional card shape change alarm used for embedded library functions
  • More flexibility for load alarms allowing direct load limits to be entered instead of percentages if desired or to have the unit convert a load value back to a percentage for you.
  • Faster trending for timed trends: 1 sample per second versus the previous stroke based minimum.
  • Improved tracking of commonly requested values: position switch closures seen and missed, today's load and position spikes, etcetera.
  • More host commands to make configuration easier.
  • Communication input and output buffers are increased to 3,072 bytes allowing more data to be transmitted or received in a single message with AutoCom. The AutoCom protocol is moved to release 2 offering additional supported message types with less overhead per packet.
  • Higher speed operation via the Falcon C development system.
  • Prioritized task processing for more uniform load and position readings under heavy load