You Select, We Connect

eWON industrial remote connectivity routers are designed to meet demanding industrial requirements, providing interoperability and continuity between remote installations or assets and central monitoring and control systems (SCADA, etc.).

For everything from simple alarm notification systems to permanent IP connections through the Internet, eWON products can be used in a wide variety of situations:

• Connecting SCADA systems to remote terminal units (RTUs)
• Remote monitoring of installations or assets
• Remote metering in water, energy, or green technology applications
• Constructing industrial remote access networks for permanent online asset control 
• etc.

See the related links for application notes on typical tasks that can be performed using our eWON devices and solutions. 

In the industrial remote connectivity world, eWON is regarded as an industrial router that routes IP messages back and forth between a local area network (LAN) or machine LAN (a local area network where industrial devices are connected via Ethernet) and a wide area network (WAN) – usually the Internet – or a remote bidirectional connection called PPP.  

With a WAN connection, the user must also navigate the Internet network in order to access the eWON unit remotely. This is currently the preferred eWON configuration, since it provides faster connection with worldwide availability and supports a large variety of connection media: PSTN, ISDN, GPRS, 3G/3G+, ADSL, and even LAN. 

With a PPP connection, the user employs a dial-up method called RAS to establish a link between a modem connected to the public switched telephone network and another modem integrated in an eWON unit. Fewer media are available in this mode (PSTN, ISDN, and GSM data), and they are generally slower than their Internet counterparts.

In both cases – WAN or PPP – the eWON unit has an embedded modem or secondary LAN access.

The available routing features include:       

• Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) dial-in and dial-out on demand
• PPP with PAP/CHAP security and data compression
• IP forwarding, IP filtering and NAT
• Port forwarding and Port filtering
• Proxy functions
• Routing table
• DNS and DynDNS support
• DHCP support
• Internet communication through a VPN tunnel   

In addition to its industrial router capability (see Remote Connectivity for a description), eWON technology enables data acquisition and buffering, alarm triggering and notification, a web server with standard or customized HMI pages in HTML format, and several RS232/RS485 read and write functions for implementing serial protocols that are not directly supported. All of these features allow system integrators to provide integrated services and value-added services on top of their products or offer complete, high-performance integrated remote servicing tools. 

Data acquisition

eWON technology is able to perform local data acquisition using the serial or Ethernet port. The data acquisition process is built around a tagged database in which each tag is associated with an I/O server. 

eWON is able to perform data acquisition with the following protocols:

• Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP 
• Uni-Telway
  
• EtherNet/IP, DF1 
• FINS TCP, FINS Hostlink
  
• ISO TCP, PPI, MPI, Profibus
  
• Mistubishi FX
  
• Hitachi EH
  
• ASCII

Alarm triggering and notification

eWON technology provides full support for alarm triggering, acknowledgment, status and traceability. Several alarm parameters can be defined for each eWON tag, including:

• Various thresholds (LowLow, Low, High, HighHigh)
• Threshold deadbands
• Activation delay
• Alarm hints 

eWON technology provides a managed four-phase alarm life cycle when an alarm is triggered:  

• ALM: Alarms status
  
• RTN: Return to normal but not yet Acknowledged
  
• ACK: Acknowledged but still present
  

Real-time tracing of the alarm status is available for monitoring on the real-time alarms page of the eWON web site.

eWON also includes a powerful alarm notification system. Notifications can be generated on every change of the alarm life cycle status. Alarm notifications can be sent by:

1. E-mail
   
2. Text messaging (SMS)
   
3. Put FTP
   
4. SNMP trap
   

Data logs can be attached to alarm e-mail messages to enable users to trace and diagnose the various alarms events.
 
Pre-defined HTML reports can be generated using Word, Excel or an HTML editor and can include bookmarks, placeholders, and fields that are replaced dynamically each time an eWON unit sends a new report by FTP or e-mail. This is performed using :

• the Server Side Include (SSI) function of the eWON web server;
• the Active Server Page (ASP) function of eWON.
  

Thanks to these functions, eWON is able to send activity reports at fixed time intervals and/or in the event of an alarm for management, maintenance and service purposes.

Data logging and buffering

Continuous data logging and buffering can be performed for every eWON task. Two types of data logging are available:

• real-time logging (in RAM);
• historical logging (in flash memory).

eWON logging capacity is:

• 16,384 to 139,264 entries (time tag and value) for historical logging
• 15,000 entries (time tag and value) for real-time logging

The data log can easily be retrieved by FTP or attached to an e-mail message in text format (CSV) or binary format. 

A powerful scripting language engine (Export Block Descriptor) is available for defining the contents of the exported data log. 

Finally, an online graph utility (multiple pen, multiple axis) is available on the historical data page of the eWON internal web server for monitoring, maintenance, or service purposes. 

Web server

The eWON unit has an integrated web server for configuration and monitoring purposes. A user section is available in FTP for custom websites. The size of this user section ranges from 4 to 20 MB, depending on the eWON type and firmware version. 

The custom web site can be generated using any HTML editor (FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.) and supports dynamic pages using:   

• Server Side Include (SSI); 
• Active Server Page (ASP).  

eWON also provides its own software tool, called viewON 2, for developing dynamic HMI pages. The dynamic behavior arises from the fact that all objects and symbols on these pages have their properties associated with eWON tag values. Consequently, when a value changes the associated object property changes accordingly.
   

Basic scripting

eWON can be fully scripted using a Basic scripting language, which allows automation engineers to design simple automated connectivity tasks such as:

• Reading and writing data via the serial port for industrial devices with proprietary protocols
• Sending e-mail messages; uploading and downloading FTP files
• Replying to incoming text messages
• Managing TCP/IP routing tables and features  
• Dynamically updating the eWON unit configuration
• Handling events such as timers, alarms, and tag changes and many more

Basic scripting language can also be incorporated in a custom web page to build dynamic web content. This technique is called “Active Server Page.”   

Java programming

The eWON units can also be programmed in Java. The Java programming language is usually dedicated to ICT software development. The purpose of Java availability in the eWON product range is to provide developers with an industrial device that supports a powerful, general-purpose programming language while providing industrial connectivity capability at their fingertips.  

Java is intended to be used for deploying large eWON based applications, since it provides flexibility and scalability.

The Java environment available in the eWON units is Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME).