We proudly present our new service brand. Under the label “Smart Grid Technologies” we provide a broad range of services related to the implementation of IEC 61850 and other smart grid communication protocols (like IEC 60870-5-101/104, DNP3). From initial consulting and training up to implementation and standard conformance certification we can provide support in all the phases of evaluation and implementation of smart grid communication protocols into your devices and systems. Please check out our complete portfolio at smart-grid-technologies.com. In the future you will also find some more detailed technical articles there.

I am happy to announce the new release 0.9.2 of the IEC 61850 library. This release contains a lot of small new features and stability improvements. The most notable change is the client and server side support for the logging ACSI service. Provided are new examples for client and server side usage of this service. A detailed tutorial will follow. For the server a generic interface is provided to support an application specific way to store the logged data. The library is delivered with an implementation of this interface using the sqlite database. With the addition of the logging service support for the IEC 61850 ACSI services is almost complete.
Please see the CHANGELOG for more information about changes and new features.

This new release contains a lot of changes under the hood. These changes include some bug fixes as well as improvements to make the buffered reporting and file server module more compliant with UCA test cases. There are also some enhancements to the .NET API. A new feature of this release is the sampled values (SV – IEC 61850-9-2) subscriber implementation and the experimental publisher implementation. There are also new examples to show how to use the new features.

Today’s release contains a lot of changes under the hood to improve standard compliance and interoperability with other implementations. There are also a lot of small bug fixes for bugs reported by users. This release also contains some smaller API enhancements especially for the .NET API. Be aware that the server side API changed at one point – the WriteAccessHandler that is used to inform the server application that some writable data attributes are accessed. The signature of these callback has changed! There is now a user defined parameter to simplify application design. Also the return value changed so the application designer can control the return code of the negative WriteData response. Don’t forget to change your application accordingly when updating to this release. Please see also the CHANGELOG for additional information about new features and changes.

I uploaded HydroInterOp examples for libiec61850. These examples are provided by Denis Francesconi (Hydro Quebec) to show how to use data models for hydro power plants based on IEC 61850-7-410. The HydroInterOp examples are a forward step in the development of inter-operable and interchangeable plant level IEDs for hydro power plants (HPP), that is one step closer to having “HPP ready” certified IEDs. HydroInterOp is based on the ongoing work within IEC-TC57 WG18 to develop an implementable hydro information model and conformance test cases based on the IEC 61850 suite. Currently the WG18 is working on a conformance test case document IEC TS 61850-10-210.
The examples work with libIEC61850 version 0.8.4 out of the box. In order to be used with more recent versions of libIEC61850 the data models (static_model.c/.h) have to be recreated by the genmodel.jar tool.

The iGigaSwitch 1604E by Nexans Deutschland GmbH, Advanced Networking Solutions is the first network switch device with integrated IEC 61850 server and UCA level A certificate. It is using the libIEC61850 IEC 61850/MMS implementation and recently received its UCA level A certificate for edition 2 of the standard. IEC 61850 can be used to monitor and configure the proper operation of the device. This device is the next step to a substation using IEC 61850 as the only SCADA communication protocol.

The update to release 0.8.2 contains a lot of small extensions and bug fixes. Some of the most notable changes are support for setting group control, a refactoring of the GOOSE subscriber and the extensions to the C# client API.

This new release brings some internal refactoring and some small changes in HAL. This was required to make the threading behavior of the server side stack more configurable. Starting with this release a user of the library can select between a multi-threaded or single-threaded operation mode and a “thread-less” operation mode that doesn’t use threads at all. The new operation modes are intended to save resources. The non-threaded operation mode simplifies porting to platforms where pre-emptive multi-threading is not available or too expensive. Therefore it is especially applicable for small embedded systems. Here you can find instructions on how to control the threading behavior. Also the C# client API has been extended and the documentation has been improved. An online API documentation for C# can be found here.

Release 0.7.7 contains a lot of small improvements and bug fixes (please have a look at the changelog for more details). Some improvements worth mentioning are the socket and ethernet layer implementations for Mac OS X (thanks to Michael Clausen / HES-SO Valais) and the C# client API that will be an inherent part of future releases of the library. Please be aware that the current implementation of the C# API should be considered as a preview version with some functions of the library still missing. The C# wrapper library and examples are working on current versions of the .NET framework as well as with Mono 3.x on Linux and Mac OS X.

Today I released version 0.7.2. The most important new features are the possibility to create data models at runtime by means of the server API, and to create data models at runtime by parsing a configuration file. The file format is very simple to avoid much overhead due to the file parser. As a consequence it is not any longer required to recompile and update the application program when changing the data model structure or adding some model elements. Integrated in this release is also a tool to create server configuration files by SCL files. The other major change is the integration of a more flexible mechanism for client authentication and access control. This version also includes new examples for the new features since version 0.7 (including file read and directory services).