ASE 2000 Version 2 Test Set Webinar

so good morning to all i am stern jose joining from applied systems engineering office in campbell and i have larry price uh who will be presenting this webinar for us and to introduce him he is a field engineer and sales engineer in electric oil and gas and water wastewater markets he has 25 years of network communication experience and he has also worked in industrial scada environment including distribution automation automated metering and smart grid initiatives presently larry price is the sales engineer support engineer and a technical trainer for ase and he has conducted a lot of training programs for ac 2000 test set communication software so with this i am passing the control to larry price uh hi larry you may take over now hello thank you everyone for joining us today today's webinar is uh covering ase 2000 version 2 test set we're going to discuss version 2 upgrade benefits a little background on applied systems engineering or ase we were founded in 1982 began consulting in industrialized and the electric utility industries created uh our first protocol test set in 1989 which was a dos based application and across our product lines we have about 100 protocols that we support and counting and are currently a dmp3 executive committee member we were acquired by our parent company calcutech in 2014 and calcutech has a vast number of protocols that they support have developed over a number of years in european and asian markets as well as other uh operational areas in across the world there's some new version or features in the version two tests that that differ from version one we introduced the task based operation mode which simplifies some of the testing options available there's a rtu simulation feature which we'll get into here briefly but it's a much more user-friendly environment for point simulation creating air conditions while testing as well as provide some enhanced monitoring options version one had a stationary display not a lot of flexibility in the test environment to look at different data sets and we've since taken some user feedback and offered some additional options under task mode in the version 2 test set you'll see a bit of a difference in the overall appearance of the display tasks are grouped according to the protocol that you have selected for your your test environment and tasks are grouped together by logical functions such as static scans issuing controls you would have in under your control section you would have select before operate direct operate options etc and all of this is protocol dependent of course and it eliminates the need for protocol expertise and allows users to select pre-populated tasks and doesn't require a lot of advance operator use to issue controls and implement differing test scenarios and the message format is automatically defined and enables you to send view and monitor responses under rtu simulation we have the ability now to link control actions to inputs so in the case of a relay or some other device with an actual control point you can map the output point to an endpoint point on your rtu simulation to validate and verify that control operations are received we can also perform point simulation live real time during testing with a master station in the case of an rtu simulation and then we also have the ability to trigger events and write to a log file which i will show you here shortly in a live demonstration and digital analog and counter values can all be defined and sorted based on your display preferences a little bit about the enhanced monitoring options a much more flexible layout as i stated before users can manipulate the screens where it best fits their preferences we also have a message filtering option a quick highlight on that the communications exchanges as they're received real time can be filtered based on user criteria we have a drop down menu or a check box that you can select to target specific messages elements or objects that you're looking for when performing advanced analysis of outstations or in the case of a master station you can generate individual responses and determine how that is being processed by that master station and then one other change that we made was the line monitor view instead of having a line monitored raw view in addition to a regular line monitor view it's all been combined into one display where raw information is displayed or the bit or byte or hex values are displayed on one side and they actually interpreted messages displayed on the adjacent side and i'll show you that during my demonstration and highlight some additional capabilities with that the ase 2000 test set version 2 is a 32 and 64 bit a capable application that runs on windows versions vista all the way up to windows 10 presently you can perform master simulation and outstation simulation both with the tool it supports rs 232 and ethernet tcp as well bit and by protocols are supported with our test set and we cover a multitude of standard and legacy protocols and presently it's the de facto standard worldwide and used across a variety of industries presently version one test set users may be familiar with our usb bcom here displayed in this photo this is our one of our options for hardware licensing the application the bcom interface is still supported with version two and still very much necessary in today's testing environments across cada because pc manufacturers no longer build serial ports on their machines without a special order and even if you had a serial port provided on your pc certain legacy bit protocols are not supported and you would need a hardware device to emulate proper signaling it's a usb powered device supports rs-232 you can utilize a rs-485 adapter and in addition we provide diagnostics leds which is instrumental when it comes to debug and troubleshooting because in certain scenarios even though you've defined a configuration for testing and it appears that you're actually sending information to a destination device without leds it's very challenging to determine whether or not you're actually sending the message the message was received and these leds are pretty handy in identifying communication setup scenarios where a parameter may have not been defined correctly or it can support a conclusion where a device received a perfectly defined message and it's not responding accordingly and another hardware licensing option is our usb dongle that's a dongle for plugging right into your usb port the bcom is not necessarily required and certain end users that are only testing on ethernet environments often choose that option only smaller it's portable and it's just easier for them to use and keep track of these hardware licenses are interchangeable you can share them amongst multiple users the ase 2000 test set can be installed on any machine version one or version two and with the hardware licensing model that we provide you can share those licenses across those users any questions uh presently okay looking don't see any questions there's some additional file import and export options with version two of the test set captured communications can be saved in a monox file which i'll show you here shortly we also have the ability to take points list or point view list and export those into csv files for editing sharing with technicians and engineers and then importing and then we have also added the file query capability so you could search across message exchanges for particular sequences errors identified by the source device id or destination id or object type etc and then in addition to that we have third-party data file import export capability and many it users presently in the scada room use wireshark to identify anomalies on ethernet network segments and the output of the wireshark file can be imported directly into the test set one key advantage here is not only can you communicate with those i.t professionals that have no protocol expertise but you can take the information provided by them in reference to your scada environment import that into the tool and it parses out or eliminates all the tcpip wrappers and specifically displays protocol information or protocol based exchanges and then in addition we have some exchange editing enhancements in the exchange mode of operation that our version one users are familiar with and now i'll show you a live demonstration of the asc merchant to tesla while we load the ac2000 test set i would like to point out that if you have any questions please feel free to post the same uh into the questions or chat box in the webinar uh so that we can answer them thank you please continue larry so i've launched the ase test set and the first time that you launch version two this is pretty much what you would see on your screen and i have some buttons down on the lower left hand corner i would like to point out there is a master simulation quick hotkey or button that you can press we also have the monitoring option here we also have the rtu simulation option and what would be new to most of you is this rm or remote monitoring option it's only applicable to the ase spt series of our product but essentially what it does is it provides you the ability to remotely connect to any ip based target as long as you have ethernet connectivity and you can run the test set as if you were locally present so the key advantage there is you do not have to mobilize to a remote site to determine the root cause of a communication problem or some sort of failure condition you can perform all testing from your your desk or office location on the upper uh left side we've got some control option operations i'll highlight here briefly but the task mode of operation is selected by the menu up top the mode of operation and once in task mode you have to define your rtu definition or the parameters of the device that you're going to test so i would simply right click in this area configure the rtu option and here's a list of different test parameters that i performed across different rtu types you have a name field which is locally significant only and then you have your protocol option and the protocol options listed are going to be specific to the hardware licensing that you presently have if you're licensed for only three protocols per your original purchase only those three would be listed here and today's demonstration will be utilizing the dmp3 protocol so once you select your protocol you define your outstation id and using our rrtu wizard it guides you through the rest of the process you can define your point types you have multiple options available either in single bit or double bit format and today i'm going to utilize single bit analog inputs you can define your your point index and range and analog inputs add 10 binaries now depending on the actual point type you can reutilize sequences as long as the point types are different we often get asked about that under dmp3 simulation for master simulation operation it's not necessary to create the point list you can actually directly interrogate the target device to retrieve that information however i wanted to display how you defined your rtu database task mode is based on task groups and task sets and here we have initialization tasks static tasks specific counter tasks you also have the option to read time and date information or perform time synchronization services or controls and then under our direct operational control task group you have the dmp3 applicable options available select before operate direct relay etc and we also support file operation commands we can read write specific tools specific files based on criteria such as the directory you can define in this smaller window user authentication parameters the name password actual file name etc in dmp3 supports secure authentication i'm not going to go into a great amount of detail on secure authentication but we support version 2 and version 5 secure authentication testing each group has might have a sub window here to allow you to define additional parameters and for those of you that are not fans of the vertical type columns or necessarily tasks listed by grouping you can define exactly what you want modify your parameters to make it more user-friendly based on your circumstances also in the enhancement with version 2 we've added some options for display so presently i have a blank message window that is defined by all these view options i've checked up here i'll walk through these uh under scripts and test procedures we have the ability to import existing scripts with the tool existing scripts presently include dmp3 certification scripts and to view those you would simply use the file import option [Music] point it to your your directory find the applicable script level one level two and these are all um dmp3 specifics published scripts once you select that it will populate with that predefined script and then based on my operators up here i can actually commence that sequence and then view the responses from the device under test and it it saves the results you basically take those results export them and then if you were going through official certification process with dmp3.org they would review that and there's some additional op options available such as getting your device listed as a conformant on their website etc you can also define custom scripts so if i were to go in and define a existing script that this covers all my testing needs and you'll have to forgive me here because i have a small window in my lower right hand side but i can add elements a particular sequence add objects etc data link example send data link replace the element then take this information and save that and export it your workspace generally will be fairly consistent if you're using a similar rtu definition for most scenarios you can take this information presently simply do a file save as and my project will be saved to a location of my choice get right to that directory and then i could take that existing testing profile share that with other technicians and engineers in my group and save them the time of having to walk through and manually define their rtu database the other option here is to define event tables so from the master simulation side for binary i could define specific states and define the alarm mask and i will actually do that or demonstrate that during a live point simulation so let's walk through some of the additional viewing features you also have a message filter over here which once i populate with traffic i'll show you some of the options there there's a message filter view the point list view which some of you are familiar with there's also the line monitor view which is up here which will once populated i'll show you some information on that and then the messages view these three are the most popular views to be used in task mode they show basically all of the information both raw interpreted and the entire communication exchange sequences between source and destination device you have an event log option here once you define all your triggers this is the information that will be displayed in a file that you can locally write to this is a similar feature to version one of the test set version one test set all captures were saved to a file that would had a designated file size parameter that you could define and up top we also have the script editor which i showed you under the tools in the properties section we have our communication parameters that we can define the direction to your rtu or target as well as the the from location or master option you can toggle these so if you previously defined it don't have live communications you can simply stop the simulation toggle these values and then begin again it just saves you the time of having to navigate back to the communications tab and make those changes in addition to the communication properties you have display property options available most of this is very straightforward to you users you can display millisecond time for example rtu response time or last bits sent versus first bit received and then i'll talk about checking the enabled exchanges only when i'm in exchange mode but this is specific to exchange mode and then under point simulation you have the ability to define formatting bits bit lengths raw units etc and then under our event variables my event or when an event condition is defined and triggered i can either log it simply display it have an audible alert and then there's some additional events for the exchange communication errors the options are the same through these choices and then this is what we call the protocol specific tab and i defined a different rtu protocol different options would be applicable based on that protocol here we've got the option under simulation to define rtu options such as internal indicators i can generate failure conditions quality flags etc using some of these parameters and then we have default variation options that can be changed and for today's simulation i will use a source address of one and then if i were to be testing secure authentication version two or version five i would have some options here and then the key is to make sure my line properties are the same 9600 and then up on the upper right hand side this is our timeline which is used for a real-time display of communication signals like the bcom unit this is a device uh troubleshooting aid or an application troubleshooting aid you'll you'll see uh live traffic here shortly it simply will tell you when you see a carrier signal detected and a rtu response it's it's a fairly good indicator of i when you're trying to identify set up discrepancies or understand why a device is either not responding or you're getting some sort of error result so i've defined my initial our rtu preferences i'm going to launch another simulation here i'm utilizing a bcom today communicating with another session and here i would select rtu simulation as you can see based on the protocol the options are the same one item to point out or one thing to note is when you open anytime you open the test set the previously known working configuration will be displayed this saves you some setup time if you're setting up a device on one side and attempting to match it with the other so you can establish communications i define rtu simulation it's listed up here as well as the mode of operation task mode and then here's my point list view on my point list view i have some different options available the name field and description field which are locally significant it's not going to populate the device database with this information and i can enter raw values i also had the ability to scale i could under my point options i could actually add some scaling options here and see either or see both raw units and engineering units you've got equalities timestamp you've got a quality field there's a time stamp field upper and lower limits that you can define for analogs or binary states that you can define for binary inputs and then you have the ability to increment or toggle points so in the case of a binary a one value would be patella to toggle on or off so every successful scan and pull response would result in a transition and then in the case of a buy or an analog i have the option to add the increment value so in this case i've it should increment by the number i specified each successful read so i can start my simulation the timeline up above shows no signals which is what i would expect until i begin my master simulation and then you have the option for task frequency and task here the controls up here are to run consistently or constantly so the start would tell it to perform an all static data scan continuously the target device would be 22 or station 22 so i could send that information once and then some of you and version 1 users will be familiar with the line monitor view here on the left hand side we have the actual raw information being transmitted and then what we call the interpreted field so if i highlight specific areas in my message i can identify where in that sequence they are such as qualifiers actual point information and data values etc under my point list view if i were performing live simulation which is what i am i should see my pointless toggling and we've got the messages view let's go over here and let's go back to continuous and here you can see on my master simulation i'm receiving real-time white toggles as they occur so real time i can change this information and see i should see that information corresponding on the other side a handy feature is it will highlight the fields as the value change is detected as i said before in tasmania a little more simplified if i want to inject a quality flag you'll also see that from your master or should see that for your master any questions on this presently uh let me do you see a question okay i thought i saw a question there we stopped we have one question uh it is uh so one customer is asking what are the benefits so to summarize yeah we are going through the entire presentation and we might have some uh conclusions though right so do you want to compress that question now or later i could i could answer it now and then um we could circle back to that here at toward the end of the demonstration but one of the key event advantages is simplified task groups the fact that you you already have pre-populated options here um i will i'll show you exchange mode and and you'll see some of the the efficiency with this versus exchange mode exchange mode is a little more tedious version one test set users presently use an exchange list to identify an actual communication exchange type and then there are additional parameters they have to populate the time evolved to define that and the overall process is very tedious it links and lengthens the overall time to set up for testing and it's it requires a lot of interpretation and know-how and we get a lot of questions on that still and the version 2 test set simplifies all of that there's some enhancements with the exchange mode of operation that i'll show you here shortly and from a user experience my personal experience i find task mode much more efficient in the case where let's say i go out on in the field and i'm providing field services i can quickly set up my rtu parameters define the communication sequence that i want to send to it and test really quickly and identify um a few things rather quickly which would be is the device receiving the message what am i sending to it um how is it responding you have all of that ability with version one but the overall time involved for engineering that test is uh it's at least double of what you would experience using tasks with so hopefully that answers your question uh and larry there is one more question on the wireshark file loading into ac2000 so are you planning to present that part i am planning to present that part the demo today is serial based but i can show you that here shortly okay so one of the other options that you have available in the version 2 test set are some file capturing options so i can go in and in this area up here this field up here i can actually add a file capture name seven main and then a maximum number of entries this is a cyclical file which means first in and then once it exceeds the maximum limit it would start to overwrite that original entry or the first entry and this is the the maximum number of entries specifies at messages so if i were to start that hit start begin my communication sequence and this button up here i often connect it it's not required but if you had a scenario where you possibly have unsolicited messages you want to maintain that persistent connection across your communication segment to ensure you receive those there are all my messages stop let's uh start some generate some traffic really quickly stop now i have the option of exporting everything buffered in my work session the last four 400 messages will be displayed in that file if you need a larger file that's where this file capture option is going to be handy or useful i can stop my capture i could actually look at the capture and as you can see here i generated 48 messages this is in both directions so for 24 out 24 in and then i can take this this file i can export this information share this with other users the other user on on their end would receive this file import an email and then they can put it on my desktop hey i think it is rto33 you just served yeah notification and then one of the other enhancements with version two that we didn't have with version one there were scenarios with version one users sharing files where during the import process they would experience some sort of error we didn't necessarily know if it was related to the operator or something specific to the file so we added some additional information to be viewed when you're importing to know whether or not you're there's actually information present what the protocol is the software version build code for your test set this is very useful when we are troubleshooting those types of scenarios and then as you can see it imported all that information into my workspace and if i were to go through and look for a particular sequence i have options here to create a new new message let me move my window that you can't see and then we have different options available i can use internal indicators i could select a specific direction i could also i have additional element and object properties specified values point types or group ids group types and i could actually just target specific destination or sources in desired exchanges i want to see and show the results you also have the ability during most sessions to find specific messages and then you can repeat that through your entire exchange until you find your your target communication sequence so for wireshark the question regarding wireshark is if i had a wireshark file which would look like this information here as you can see some of the information is parsed out wireshark allows you to basically drill down to specific fields and see what was what it actually was sent but this is not entirely useful for scada engineers and technicians but i do have the option in the test in the wireshark test set to export rtu xyz and then there are different file suffix options that you can select and we support pcapp and pcapng files for import and on the test set regardless of my present uh scenario which um is more it's specific to serial i'm going to import just communication messages file import communication messages and over here i have the option to import msgx files msgx files are version 2 files we also can import wireshark files we've added text file support for older legacy protocols that don't follow necessarily common formats and our spt series product has a specific capture file that we can import here and so for wireshark files let me let me redo this for sure let me import that file well import uh there's a discrepancy and i'm not sure what how is that that's how you would you would import that information i might have um some sort of might be pointing to the wrong file so information would populate there under exchange mode in the interest of time going to keep going once in exchange mode you have the ability to define selected exchanges based on the protocol that you've opted for this is very similar to what you see in version one of the test set so file select protocol if i needed to change that i would do that in this method using this method file my protocol no dmp3 serial dmp3 lan wan and dp dmp3 serial are identical in message format so the methodology here would be the same with the exception of ip information being specified in your test so for version one test set users this would look very familiar under tools and properties if i weren't running an actual sequence just yet i would go in here and for display select enabled exchanges only and then presently what is showing me now is like it will display any of these commands and it does this by default but there was a specific sequence i desired i can simply clear them out add in what i wanted so we might have a link status request might want to add a binary input scan might want to add analog input such as my example and then you either click over here or double click on the cell and here you have the option to simply display it as it's seen during the communication sequence i can transmit so in this case i would actually transmit an analog input request you have some additional fields for rtu simulation and i can specify a destination source id and then additional object properties here or i can click right here and here i could specify information such as a range of points ranger points sorry my mouse is not cooperating okay or in the case of generating a response to a master station request during rtu simulation i can inject some quality codes or failure codes and then here i simply have display or transmit it's going to repeat that every two seconds and i can continue this with these other listed exchanges so so in the case of simulating multiple rtu's a scenario where you're testing multiple rtus from say a single master i would want to have different destination ids specified so i can simply copy these paste modify and repeat but each exchange will have to be flag for transmit and then the regular interval would have to be specified i could send that these any questions on that this should be fairly similar to version one but i find it the overall menu to be a little more friendly a lot more efficient the copy paste option is extremely handy rather than going through each exchange clicking adding that shortens the actual setup time test time and that's wireshark advanced monitoring we do have support as i said for wireshark additional fire file capture options and i see a question let me are there any questions looks like there's one i'm trying to expand my so larry uh i think uh we have passed 15 minutes so if you would like to uh cover any additional slides we can do that and then come to the questions yeah certainly really quick some other features uh just to highlight the wireshark capability uh spt users our other hardware users can now remotely run the test set we have the ability to script and import uh d not only create manual scripts but we support dmp3 certification for our dmp3 users out there file operation sequences i see what else version 2 tessa can be downloaded for free you can utilize version 1 and version two has set on the same machine and version one uh additional consideration is version one development has ended that that ended some time back in version two is presently comes with uh one one year warranty from date of shipment for new purchasers that provides you with uh support mechanisms dedicated support and you're also entitled within that one year time frame access to any enhancements fixes etc that are available and most importantly is version 2 is free for you to review and try out on your own we encourage you to download that check it out uh larry we have a few questions uh uh so uh first one is uh is there a specific scenario uh in which we should use exchange mode or task mode that is one question we have here and yes there is in a scenario where i would be testing multiple rtus i would recommend that you use exchange mode you can simulate multiple rtus under task mode it's a little more it's it's a little obscure because you'll have additional fields displayed let me show you this real quick so if i go to task mode and all by the way i can actually save these exchanges and this will be in a monox format so in a one-to-one scenario i would generally recommend using task mode it's a more simplified um quick and efficient setup but for exchange mode as i demonstrated you would or exchange yeah exchange mode you would use the exchange list to identify all those different communication uh sequences and specify your different upstation destination ids or destination ids but in task mode i could select an additional rtu simulation hit finish give it a second here and then once i start it i would have an additional tab i'm sorry this is for um an rtu rtu simulation and where's my tab at but for rtu simulation task mode would be fine if you were simulating multiple rtus communicating to the master but for a master testing multiple rtus or outbound communications this would be more ideal for scripting and sequencing this information such as the example i provided previously next question yeah uh there is a question on uh hardware uh so the question is do i need a new hardware to run version two you do not uh the present hardware licensing options be it usb bcom or usb sentinel and i do believe we still have some pcmcia users you would use the firmware license updater to load either the a new license or you would simply request a trial license for running version two of the test set one additional feature that i glossed over was version two test set users can capture communication exchanges and then export that information into a file and send that to non-licensed users that can download either our message viewer from our website which is free to download or they can actually download version two of our test set and it's simply a stripped down version of the tool that would provide a message view for them to parse out the information uh during that you captured during your testing so it doesn't require third parties to buyer or procure our tool and allows you to easily exchange this information for sharing and coordinated debugging analysis such as you might have an issue with a particular rtu and wanted to share that information with the rtu manufacturer and all of those protocol specific exchanges would be displayed on their screen and they would be able to see exactly what you see as a tester next question yeah next question is on the dnp3 certification testing uh the question is is there to perform dnp3 certification testing yes we have information in the test set um we have the entire manual is presently part of the installation and we have supplemental information that we could provide users for defining scripted operations or utilizing the dmp3 certification script okay and we have another question on the detailed training of ic 2000 test set uh the question is how do i find out about training classes and availability for training classes we recommend you contact sales at ase or directly inquire via our website we have some openings the remainder part of the year but the sooner that we're contacted the the better we can coordinate and answer or fulfill any requests uh what is one more question which is on the running multiple tasks in the task mode so the question is in task mode can we run multiple tasks you can run multiple tasks so um oh i'm sorry not in task mode so in task mode it's more singular focus for specific tasks you can't sequence them however if you had more than one operation desired you could manually select those individually but it's more singular in scope and that's where that that is a scenario where exchange mode of operation would be more beneficial you could define all of those tasks in sequence by interval etc and larry we could also change the or change the exchanges dynamically in the new version right that also would be an advantage of correct uh real time while testing um in the extent in the exchanges i can edit modify and uh generate those communications um either outbound or as a response to yeah i think uh we are running out of time so it's almost uh one hour i think we can answer them uh separately uh to the centers and uh we are probably in the interest of time uh shall we wind up do you have anything additional to specify at this point just uh real quick thank you very much for your time i know that there's a lot of different features that i glossed over rather quickly i do encourage you to take a look at version two of the test set as i said it's free to download and for you to review and evaluate determine if those enhancements are going to better benefit you in your test environment if you have any additional questions please let us know we'll be happy to provide a follow-up or any amplifying information for any questions that may arise thanks again okay so with this uh we will wind up the webinar and thanks for joining and uh and also uh see uh for new webinars in our website so to take your time to login and see what all things are coming up thank you all for joining you

so good morning to all i am stern jose joining from applied systems engineering office in campbell and i have larry price uh who will be presenting this webinar for us and to introduce him he is a field engineer and sales engineer in electric oil and gas and water wastewater markets he has 25 years of network communication experience and he has also worked in industrial scada environment including distribution automation automated metering and smart grid initiatives presently larry price is the sales engineer support engineer and a technical trainer for ase and he has conducted a lot of training programs for ac 2000 test set communication software so with this i am passing the control to larry price uh hi larry you may take over now hello thank you everyone for joining us today today&#39;s webinar is uh covering ase 2000 version 2 test set we&#39;re going to discuss version 2 upgrade benefits a little background on applied systems engineering or ase we were founded in 1982 began consulting in industrialized and the electric utility industries created uh our first protocol test set in 1989 which was a dos based application and across our product lines we have about 100 protocols that we support and counting and are currently a dmp3 executive committee member we were acquired by our parent company calcutech in 2014 and calcutech has a vast number of protocols that they support have developed over a number of years in european and asian markets as well as other uh operational areas in across the world there&#39;s some new version or features in the version two tests that that differ from version one we introduced the task based operation mode which simplifies some of the testing options available there&#39;s a rtu simulation feature which we&#39;ll get into here briefly but it&#39;s a much more user-friendly environment for point simulation creating air conditions while testing as well as provide some enhanced monitoring options version one had a stationary display not a lot of flexibility in the test environment to look at different data sets and we&#39;ve since taken some user feedback and offered some additional options under task mode in the version 2 test set you&#39;ll see a bit of a difference in the overall appearance of the display tasks are grouped according to the protocol that you have selected for your your test environment and tasks are grouped together by logical functions such as static scans issuing controls you would have in under your control section you would have select before operate direct operate options etc and all of this is protocol dependent of course and it eliminates the need for protocol expertise and allows users to select pre-populated tasks and doesn&#39;t require a lot of advance operator use to issue controls and implement differing test scenarios and the message format is automatically defined and enables you to send view and monitor responses under rtu simulation we have the ability now to link control actions to inputs so in the case of a relay or some other device with an actual control point you can map the output point to an endpoint point on your rtu simulation to validate and verify that control operations are received we can also perform point simulation live real time during testing with a master station in the case of an rtu simulation and then we also have the ability to trigger events and write to a log file which i will show you here shortly in a live demonstration and digital analog and counter values can all be defined and sorted based on your display preferences a little bit about the enhanced monitoring options a much more flexible layout as i stated before users can manipulate the screens where it best fits their preferences we also have a message filtering option a quick highlight on that the communications exchanges as they&#39;re received real time can be filtered based on user criteria we have a drop down menu or a check box that you can select to target specific messages elements or objects that you&#39;re looking for when performing advanced analysis of outstations or in the case of a master station you can generate individual responses and determine how that is being processed by that master station and then one other change that we made was the line monitor view instead of having a line monitored raw view in addition to a regular line monitor view it&#39;s all been combined into one display where raw information is displayed or the bit or byte or hex values are displayed on one side and they actually interpreted messages displayed on the adjacent side and i&#39;ll show you that during my demonstration and highlight some additional capabilities with that the ase 2000 test set version 2 is a 32 and 64 bit a capable application that runs on windows versions vista all the way up to windows 10 presently you can perform master simulation and outstation simulation both with the tool it supports rs 232 and ethernet tcp as well bit and by protocols are supported with our test set and we cover a multitude of standard and legacy protocols and presently it&#39;s the de facto standard worldwide and used across a variety of industries presently version one test set users may be familiar with our usb bcom here displayed in this photo this is our one of our options for hardware licensing the application the bcom interface is still supported with version two and still very much necessary in today&#39;s testing environments across cada because pc manufacturers no longer build serial ports on their machines without a special order and even if you had a serial port provided on your pc certain legacy bit protocols are not supported and you would need a hardware device to emulate proper signaling it&#39;s a usb powered device supports rs-232 you can utilize a rs-485 adapter and in addition we provide diagnostics leds which is instrumental when it comes to debug and troubleshooting because in certain scenarios even though you&#39;ve defined a configuration for testing and it appears that you&#39;re actually sending information to a destination device without leds it&#39;s very challenging to determine whether or not you&#39;re actually sending the message the message was received and these leds are pretty handy in identifying communication setup scenarios where a parameter may have not been defined correctly or it can support a conclusion where a device received a perfectly defined message and it&#39;s not responding accordingly and another hardware licensing option is our usb dongle that&#39;s a dongle for plugging right into your usb port the bcom is not necessarily required and certain end users that are only testing on ethernet environments often choose that option only smaller it&#39;s portable and it&#39;s just easier for them to use and keep track of these hardware licenses are interchangeable you can share them amongst multiple users the ase 2000 test set can be installed on any machine version one or version two and with the hardware licensing model that we provide you can share those licenses across those users any questions uh presently okay looking don&#39;t see any questions there&#39;s some additional file import and export options with version two of the test set captured communications can be saved in a monox file which i&#39;ll show you here shortly we also have the ability to take points list or point view list and export those into csv files for editing sharing with technicians and engineers and then importing and then we have also added the file query capability so you could search across message exchanges for particular sequences errors identified by the source device id or destination id or object type etc and then in addition to that we have third-party data file import export capability and many it users presently in the scada room use wireshark to identify anomalies on ethernet network segments and the output of the wireshark file can be imported directly into the test set one key advantage here is not only can you communicate with those i.t professionals that have no protocol expertise but you can take the information provided by them in reference to your scada environment import that into the tool and it parses out or eliminates all the tcpip wrappers and specifically displays protocol information or protocol based exchanges and then in addition we have some exchange editing enhancements in the exchange mode of operation that our version one users are familiar with and now i&#39;ll show you a live demonstration of the asc merchant to tesla while we load the ac2000 test set i would like to point out that if you have any questions please feel free to post the same uh into the questions or chat box in the webinar uh so that we can answer them thank you please continue larry so i&#39;ve launched the ase test set and the first time that you launch version two this is pretty much what you would see on your screen and i have some buttons down on the lower left hand corner i would like to point out there is a master simulation quick hotkey or button that you can press we also have the monitoring option here we also have the rtu simulation option and what would be new to most of you is this rm or remote monitoring option it&#39;s only applicable to the ase spt series of our product but essentially what it does is it provides you the ability to remotely connect to any ip based target as long as you have ethernet connectivity and you can run the test set as if you were locally present so the key advantage there is you do not have to mobilize to a remote site to determine the root cause of a communication problem or some sort of failure condition you can perform all testing from your your desk or office location on the upper uh left side we&#39;ve got some control option operations i&#39;ll highlight here briefly but the task mode of operation is selected by the menu up top the mode of operation and once in task mode you have to define your rtu definition or the parameters of the device that you&#39;re going to test so i would simply right click in this area configure the rtu option and here&#39;s a list of different test parameters that i performed across different rtu types you have a name field which is locally significant only and then you have your protocol option and the protocol options listed are going to be specific to the hardware licensing that you presently have if you&#39;re licensed for only three protocols per your original purchase only those three would be listed here and today&#39;s demonstration will be utilizing the dmp3 protocol so once you select your protocol you define your outstation id and using our rrtu wizard it guides you through the rest of the process you can define your point types you have multiple options available either in single bit or double bit format and today i&#39;m going to utilize single bit analog inputs you can define your your point index and range and analog inputs add 10 binaries now depending on the actual point type you can reutilize sequences as long as the point types are different we often get asked about that under dmp3 simulation for master simulation operation it&#39;s not necessary to create the point list you can actually directly interrogate the target device to retrieve that information however i wanted to display how you defined your rtu database task mode is based on task groups and task sets and here we have initialization tasks static tasks specific counter tasks you also have the option to read time and date information or perform time synchronization services or controls and then under our direct operational control task group you have the dmp3 applicable options available select before operate direct relay etc and we also support file operation commands we can read write specific tools specific files based on criteria such as the directory you can define in this smaller window user authentication parameters the name password actual file name etc in dmp3 supports secure authentication i&#39;m not going to go into a great amount of detail on secure authentication but we support version 2 and version 5 secure authentication testing each group has might have a sub window here to allow you to define additional parameters and for those of you that are not fans of the vertical type columns or necessarily tasks listed by grouping you can define exactly what you want modify your parameters to make it more user-friendly based on your circumstances also in the enhancement with version 2 we&#39;ve added some options for display so presently i have a blank message window that is defined by all these view options i&#39;ve checked up here i&#39;ll walk through these uh under scripts and test procedures we have the ability to import existing scripts with the tool existing scripts presently include dmp3 certification scripts and to view those you would simply use the file import option [Music] point it to your your directory find the applicable script level one level two and these are all um dmp3 specifics published scripts once you select that it will populate with that predefined script and then based on my operators up here i can actually commence that sequence and then view the responses from the device under test and it it saves the results you basically take those results export them and then if you were going through official certification process with dmp3.org they would review that and there&#39;s some additional op options available such as getting your device listed as a conformant on their website etc you can also define custom scripts so if i were to go in and define a existing script that this covers all my testing needs and you&#39;ll have to forgive me here because i have a small window in my lower right hand side but i can add elements a particular sequence add objects etc data link example send data link replace the element then take this information and save that and export it your workspace generally will be fairly consistent if you&#39;re using a similar rtu definition for most scenarios you can take this information presently simply do a file save as and my project will be saved to a location of my choice get right to that directory and then i could take that existing testing profile share that with other technicians and engineers in my group and save them the time of having to walk through and manually define their rtu database the other option here is to define event tables so from the master simulation side for binary i could define specific states and define the alarm mask and i will actually do that or demonstrate that during a live point simulation so let&#39;s walk through some of the additional viewing features you also have a message filter over here which once i populate with traffic i&#39;ll show you some of the options there there&#39;s a message filter view the point list view which some of you are familiar with there&#39;s also the line monitor view which is up here which will once populated i&#39;ll show you some information on that and then the messages view these three are the most popular views to be used in task mode they show basically all of the information both raw interpreted and the entire communication exchange sequences between source and destination device you have an event log option here once you define all your triggers this is the information that will be displayed in a file that you can locally write to this is a similar feature to version one of the test set version one test set all captures were saved to a file that would had a designated file size parameter that you could define and up top we also have the script editor which i showed you under the tools in the properties section we have our communication parameters that we can define the direction to your rtu or target as well as the the from location or master option you can toggle these so if you previously defined it don&#39;t have live communications you can simply stop the simulation toggle these values and then begin again it just saves you the time of having to navigate back to the communications tab and make those changes in addition to the communication properties you have display property options available most of this is very straightforward to you users you can display millisecond time for example rtu response time or last bits sent versus first bit received and then i&#39;ll talk about checking the enabled exchanges only when i&#39;m in exchange mode but this is specific to exchange mode and then under point simulation you have the ability to define formatting bits bit lengths raw units etc and then under our event variables my event or when an event condition is defined and triggered i can either log it simply display it have an audible alert and then there&#39;s some additional events for the exchange communication errors the options are the same through these choices and then this is what we call the protocol specific tab and i defined a different rtu protocol different options would be applicable based on that protocol here we&#39;ve got the option under simulation to define rtu options such as internal indicators i can generate failure conditions quality flags etc using some of these parameters and then we have default variation options that can be changed and for today&#39;s simulation i will use a source address of one and then if i were to be testing secure authentication version two or version five i would have some options here and then the key is to make sure my line properties are the same 9600 and then up on the upper right hand side this is our timeline which is used for a real-time display of communication signals like the bcom unit this is a device uh troubleshooting aid or an application troubleshooting aid you&#39;ll you&#39;ll see uh live traffic here shortly it simply will tell you when you see a carrier signal detected and a rtu response it&#39;s it&#39;s a fairly good indicator of i when you&#39;re trying to identify set up discrepancies or understand why a device is either not responding or you&#39;re getting some sort of error result so i&#39;ve defined my initial our rtu preferences i&#39;m going to launch another simulation here i&#39;m utilizing a bcom today communicating with another session and here i would select rtu simulation as you can see based on the protocol the options are the same one item to point out or one thing to note is when you open anytime you open the test set the previously known working configuration will be displayed this saves you some setup time if you&#39;re setting up a device on one side and attempting to match it with the other so you can establish communications i define rtu simulation it&#39;s listed up here as well as the mode of operation task mode and then here&#39;s my point list view on my point list view i have some different options available the name field and description field which are locally significant it&#39;s not going to populate the device database with this information and i can enter raw values i also had the ability to scale i could under my point options i could actually add some scaling options here and see either or see both raw units and engineering units you&#39;ve got equalities timestamp you&#39;ve got a quality field there&#39;s a time stamp field upper and lower limits that you can define for analogs or binary states that you can define for binary inputs and then you have the ability to increment or toggle points so in the case of a binary a one value would be patella to toggle on or off so every successful scan and pull response would result in a transition and then in the case of a buy or an analog i have the option to add the increment value so in this case i&#39;ve it should increment by the number i specified each successful read so i can start my simulation the timeline up above shows no signals which is what i would expect until i begin my master simulation and then you have the option for task frequency and task here the controls up here are to run consistently or constantly so the start would tell it to perform an all static data scan continuously the target device would be 22 or station 22 so i could send that information once and then some of you and version 1 users will be familiar with the line monitor view here on the left hand side we have the actual raw information being transmitted and then what we call the interpreted field so if i highlight specific areas in my message i can identify where in that sequence they are such as qualifiers actual point information and data values etc under my point list view if i were performing live simulation which is what i am i should see my pointless toggling and we&#39;ve got the messages view let&#39;s go over here and let&#39;s go back to continuous and here you can see on my master simulation i&#39;m receiving real-time white toggles as they occur so real time i can change this information and see i should see that information corresponding on the other side a handy feature is it will highlight the fields as the value change is detected as i said before in tasmania a little more simplified if i want to inject a quality flag you&#39;ll also see that from your master or should see that for your master any questions on this presently uh let me do you see a question okay i thought i saw a question there we stopped we have one question uh it is uh so one customer is asking what are the benefits so to summarize yeah we are going through the entire presentation and we might have some uh conclusions though right so do you want to compress that question now or later i could i could answer it now and then um we could circle back to that here at toward the end of the demonstration but one of the key event advantages is simplified task groups the fact that you you already have pre-populated options here um i will i&#39;ll show you exchange mode and and you&#39;ll see some of the the efficiency with this versus exchange mode exchange mode is a little more tedious version one test set users presently use an exchange list to identify an actual communication exchange type and then there are additional parameters they have to populate the time evolved to define that and the overall process is very tedious it links and lengthens the overall time to set up for testing and it&#39;s it requires a lot of interpretation and know-how and we get a lot of questions on that still and the version 2 test set simplifies all of that there&#39;s some enhancements with the exchange mode of operation that i&#39;ll show you here shortly and from a user experience my personal experience i find task mode much more efficient in the case where let&#39;s say i go out on in the field and i&#39;m providing field services i can quickly set up my rtu parameters define the communication sequence that i want to send to it and test really quickly and identify um a few things rather quickly which would be is the device receiving the message what am i sending to it um how is it responding you have all of that ability with version one but the overall time involved for engineering that test is uh it&#39;s at least double of what you would experience using tasks with so hopefully that answers your question uh and larry there is one more question on the wireshark file loading into ac2000 so are you planning to present that part i am planning to present that part the demo today is serial based but i can show you that here shortly okay so one of the other options that you have available in the version 2 test set are some file capturing options so i can go in and in this area up here this field up here i can actually add a file capture name seven main and then a maximum number of entries this is a cyclical file which means first in and then once it exceeds the maximum limit it would start to overwrite that original entry or the first entry and this is the the maximum number of entries specifies at messages so if i were to start that hit start begin my communication sequence and this button up here i often connect it it&#39;s not required but if you had a scenario where you possibly have unsolicited messages you want to maintain that persistent connection across your communication segment to ensure you receive those there are all my messages stop let&#39;s uh start some generate some traffic really quickly stop now i have the option of exporting everything buffered in my work session the last four 400 messages will be displayed in that file if you need a larger file that&#39;s where this file capture option is going to be handy or useful i can stop my capture i could actually look at the capture and as you can see here i generated 48 messages this is in both directions so for 24 out 24 in and then i can take this this file i can export this information share this with other users the other user on on their end would receive this file import an email and then they can put it on my desktop hey i think it is rto33 you just served yeah notification and then one of the other enhancements with version two that we didn&#39;t have with version one there were scenarios with version one users sharing files where during the import process they would experience some sort of error we didn&#39;t necessarily know if it was related to the operator or something specific to the file so we added some additional information to be viewed when you&#39;re importing to know whether or not you&#39;re there&#39;s actually information present what the protocol is the software version build code for your test set this is very useful when we are troubleshooting those types of scenarios and then as you can see it imported all that information into my workspace and if i were to go through and look for a particular sequence i have options here to create a new new message let me move my window that you can&#39;t see and then we have different options available i can use internal indicators i could select a specific direction i could also i have additional element and object properties specified values point types or group ids group types and i could actually just target specific destination or sources in desired exchanges i want to see and show the results you also have the ability during most sessions to find specific messages and then you can repeat that through your entire exchange until you find your your target communication sequence so for wireshark the question regarding wireshark is if i had a wireshark file which would look like this information here as you can see some of the information is parsed out wireshark allows you to basically drill down to specific fields and see what was what it actually was sent but this is not entirely useful for scada engineers and technicians but i do have the option in the test in the wireshark test set to export rtu xyz and then there are different file suffix options that you can select and we support pcapp and pcapng files for import and on the test set regardless of my present uh scenario which um is more it&#39;s specific to serial i&#39;m going to import just communication messages file import communication messages and over here i have the option to import msgx files msgx files are version 2 files we also can import wireshark files we&#39;ve added text file support for older legacy protocols that don&#39;t follow necessarily common formats and our spt series product has a specific capture file that we can import here and so for wireshark files let me let me redo this for sure let me import that file well import uh there&#39;s a discrepancy and i&#39;m not sure what how is that that&#39;s how you would you would import that information i might have um some sort of might be pointing to the wrong file so information would populate there under exchange mode in the interest of time going to keep going once in exchange mode you have the ability to define selected exchanges based on the protocol that you&#39;ve opted for this is very similar to what you see in version one of the test set so file select protocol if i needed to change that i would do that in this method using this method file my protocol no dmp3 serial dmp3 lan wan and dp dmp3 serial are identical in message format so the methodology here would be the same with the exception of ip information being specified in your test so for version one test set users this would look very familiar under tools and properties if i weren&#39;t running an actual sequence just yet i would go in here and for display select enabled exchanges only and then presently what is showing me now is like it will display any of these commands and it does this by default but there was a specific sequence i desired i can simply clear them out add in what i wanted so we might have a link status request might want to add a binary input scan might want to add analog input such as my example and then you either click over here or double click on the cell and here you have the option to simply display it as it&#39;s seen during the communication sequence i can transmit so in this case i would actually transmit an analog input request you have some additional fields for rtu simulation and i can specify a destination source id and then additional object properties here or i can click right here and here i could specify information such as a range of points ranger points sorry my mouse is not cooperating okay or in the case of generating a response to a master station request during rtu simulation i can inject some quality codes or failure codes and then here i simply have display or transmit it&#39;s going to repeat that every two seconds and i can continue this with these other listed exchanges so so in the case of simulating multiple rtu&#39;s a scenario where you&#39;re testing multiple rtus from say a single master i would want to have different destination ids specified so i can simply copy these paste modify and repeat but each exchange will have to be flag for transmit and then the regular interval would have to be specified i could send that these any questions on that this should be fairly similar to version one but i find it the overall menu to be a little more friendly a lot more efficient the copy paste option is extremely handy rather than going through each exchange clicking adding that shortens the actual setup time test time and that&#39;s wireshark advanced monitoring we do have support as i said for wireshark additional fire file capture options and i see a question let me are there any questions looks like there&#39;s one i&#39;m trying to expand my so larry uh i think uh we have passed 15 minutes so if you would like to uh cover any additional slides we can do that and then come to the questions yeah certainly really quick some other features uh just to highlight the wireshark capability uh spt users our other hardware users can now remotely run the test set we have the ability to script and import uh d not only create manual scripts but we support dmp3 certification for our dmp3 users out there file operation sequences i see what else version 2 tessa can be downloaded for free you can utilize version 1 and version two has set on the same machine and version one uh additional consideration is version one development has ended that that ended some time back in version two is presently comes with uh one one year warranty from date of shipment for new purchasers that provides you with uh support mechanisms dedicated support and you&#39;re also entitled within that one year time frame access to any enhancements fixes etc that are available and most importantly is version 2 is free for you to review and try out on your own we encourage you to download that check it out uh larry we have a few questions uh uh so uh first one is uh is there a specific scenario uh in which we should use exchange mode or task mode that is one question we have here and yes there is in a scenario where i would be testing multiple rtus i would recommend that you use exchange mode you can simulate multiple rtus under task mode it&#39;s a little more it&#39;s it&#39;s a little obscure because you&#39;ll have additional fields displayed let me show you this real quick so if i go to task mode and all by the way i can actually save these exchanges and this will be in a monox format so in a one-to-one scenario i would generally recommend using task mode it&#39;s a more simplified um quick and efficient setup but for exchange mode as i demonstrated you would or exchange yeah exchange mode you would use the exchange list to identify all those different communication uh sequences and specify your different upstation destination ids or destination ids but in task mode i could select an additional rtu simulation hit finish give it a second here and then once i start it i would have an additional tab i&#39;m sorry this is for um an rtu rtu simulation and where&#39;s my tab at but for rtu simulation task mode would be fine if you were simulating multiple rtus communicating to the master but for a master testing multiple rtus or outbound communications this would be more ideal for scripting and sequencing this information such as the example i provided previously next question yeah uh there is a question on uh hardware uh so the question is do i need a new hardware to run version two you do not uh the present hardware licensing options be it usb bcom or usb sentinel and i do believe we still have some pcmcia users you would use the firmware license updater to load either the a new license or you would simply request a trial license for running version two of the test set one additional feature that i glossed over was version two test set users can capture communication exchanges and then export that information into a file and send that to non-licensed users that can download either our message viewer from our website which is free to download or they can actually download version two of our test set and it&#39;s simply a stripped down version of the tool that would provide a message view for them to parse out the information uh during that you captured during your testing so it doesn&#39;t require third parties to buyer or procure our tool and allows you to easily exchange this information for sharing and coordinated debugging analysis such as you might have an issue with a particular rtu and wanted to share that information with the rtu manufacturer and all of those protocol specific exchanges would be displayed on their screen and they would be able to see exactly what you see as a tester next question yeah next question is on the dnp3 certification testing uh the question is is there to perform dnp3 certification testing yes we have information in the test set um we have the entire manual is presently part of the installation and we have supplemental information that we could provide users for defining scripted operations or utilizing the dmp3 certification script okay and we have another question on the detailed training of ic 2000 test set uh the question is how do i find out about training classes and availability for training classes we recommend you contact sales at ase or directly inquire via our website we have some openings the remainder part of the year but the sooner that we&#39;re contacted the the better we can coordinate and answer or fulfill any requests uh what is one more question which is on the running multiple tasks in the task mode so the question is in task mode can we run multiple tasks you can run multiple tasks so um oh i&#39;m sorry not in task mode so in task mode it&#39;s more singular focus for specific tasks you can&#39;t sequence them however if you had more than one operation desired you could manually select those individually but it&#39;s more singular in scope and that&#39;s where that that is a scenario where exchange mode of operation would be more beneficial you could define all of those tasks in sequence by interval etc and larry we could also change the or change the exchanges dynamically in the new version right that also would be an advantage of correct uh real time while testing um in the extent in the exchanges i can edit modify and uh generate those communications um either outbound or as a response to yeah i think uh we are running out of time so it&#39;s almost uh one hour i think we can answer them uh separately uh to the centers and uh we are probably in the interest of time uh shall we wind up do you have anything additional to specify at this point just uh real quick thank you very much for your time i know that there&#39;s a lot of different features that i glossed over rather quickly i do encourage you to take a look at version two of the test set as i said it&#39;s free to download and for you to review and evaluate determine if those enhancements are going to better benefit you in your test environment if you have any additional questions please let us know we&#39;ll be happy to provide a follow-up or any amplifying information for any questions that may arise thanks again okay so with this uh we will wind up the webinar and thanks for joining and uh and also uh see uh for new webinars in our website so to take your time to login and see what all things are coming up thank you all for joining you

Transcript for:ASE 2000 Version 2 Test Set Webinar

Transcript for:
ASE 2000 Version 2 Test Set Webinar