News

Newsletter | H1/2022

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U N B O X I N G   F L O W B O X 

COMPANY NEWSLETTER | APRIL 2021 

 

COMPANY NEWS

As of April 1st, 2022, new FLOWBOX branch office in Poland was opened. Meet our new colleague, country manager, Artur Czereszko.

Artur is experienced in function of Vice President and Director of Sales with a demonstrated history of working in the electrical and electronic manufacturing industry on different positions. Skilled in Sales, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Mentoring, Management, and Account Management. Strong sales professional graduated from Wyższa Szkoła Psychologii Społecznej w Warszawie. Before FLOWBOX he held position of Sales director for Europe at Molex Connected Enterprise Solutions sp. z o.o.

 

AWARDS

FLOWBOX | START UP ENERGY TRANSITION

The FLOWBOX solution won another award for energy efficiency and sustainability with demand response capabilities in Demand-side Innovation category.
The Start Up Energy Transition Award is an international competition for start-ups and young companies worldwide who are working on ideas affecting global energy transition and climate change.
Link As Evidence

 

FLOWBOX ABROAD | TRADE FAIRS

Great events | New contacts | New opportunitues | Energy Transition | Energy Efficiency | Demand Response | Sustainability

ENLITE POWER GEN EUROPE | ITALY I NOVEMBER 21

We were here presenting our energy efficiency and demand response FLOWBOX platform.

 

MIDDLE EAST ENERGY | DUBAI I MARCH 22

We were here presenting our latest features and discuss business opportunities about energy efficiency.

Our stand visited, among others, H.E. Jiri Slavik, the Czech ambassador in the UAE and Mr. Michal Florus, commercial counsellor of the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Abu Dhabi.

PROMOTION 

DELOITTE I FLOWBOX

In cooperation with Deloitte CZ we have produced our new promo video “Autonomous FLOWBOX platform for energy management and optimization”.
Stay tuned!
Behind the scenes from making of

 

SWISS EMBASSY I FLOWBOX

FLOWBOX is part of the nationwide panel exhibition “Can Tech Save the World?”, organized by the Embassy of Switzerland in the Czech Republic. You can visit the National Technical Library in Prague until 8 April. After that, the exhibition will travel to another location in the Czech Republic.

The opening of the exhibition was a roundtable meeting on “Swiss-Czech solutions for environmental protection”. The main speaker was Bertrand Piccard, whose lecture can be viewed here.

 

SOFTWARE NEWS

Actual SW release: 3.24.5
Release notes are available in partner info portal: Changelog 3.24 – Technical Documentation – FLOWBOX

News version 3.23.1 – 3.24.5

Major new features

  • Light theme support & improved theme colors
  • Tagging system – add custom tags to components, realms and users. Tags can be used for searching and access control.
  • New advanced component search form with “saved search” feature, including search by tags and component type.

Minor new features

  • Added 3 custom tariffs for customer use
  • Added admin-only config options to temporarily disable component property validation, e.g. for easier realm and alias changes:
    • debug.disable_component_reference_safety
    • debug.disable_property_validation
  • Meter components with manual history enabled now have an “edit” button on panel widgets, this opens a new convenient data entry form.
  • New realm panel option to periodically perform a full page reload
  • Added an option to have subpanels redirect to a custom URL

New components

  • Hardware integration

    • Tedom CHP – variant of ComAp cogeneration generator
    • Domat M710 – 4x pulse counter with Modbus RTU
    • Sonoair M – gas/air volume meter
    • Carlo Gavazzi EM300 series modbus electrometers
    • Midam R-UC013-11 autonomous room thermostat
    • Austyn RA-1 – radiator valve controller with IQRF connection
    • M-Bus calorimeters Supercal 531, 539
    • Landis+Gyr E650 meter

  • System integration and gateways

    • DotControls Propolis BMS
    • OTE electricity spot prices (experimental)
    • OPC-UA
    • SMA Data Manager (PV controller)
    • Siemens OZW672
    • WmbusmetersListener – receive wireless M-Bus frames using rtl-sdr or a compatible USB receiver

  • Virtual & logic components

    • CommandLauncher – a component to launch prepared commands (like templates)
    • LevelSwitcher – level switching by configured thresholds with hysteresis
    • SwitchCaseCmd – run a command based on equality, alternative to IfElseCmd
    • Forecast component – generic forecast, forecast data is provided by a script or an external system
    • CO2Emissions – estimate of gCO₂eq/kWh

 

Other improvements

  • Notifications

    • Improved SMS notification text, optionally including system name

  • Modbus

    • Modbus TCP components can now be accessed through a ModbusGatewayRT (useful when a direct network connection from the Flowbox server is not possible)
    • Some Modbus TCP components now support async read-out by RT daemon

  • User interface

    • Add “scroll to end” button in log viewer
    • New animation possibilities in NeoSCADA
    • More reactive update of panel widgets – components changed as a result of a user action, e.g. a button click, update on the panel immediately
    • Integer fields (property, command) now accept hex values with the 0x prefix, e.g. 0x1f, these are automatically converted
    • Autofocus search fields in setting pages

  • Search

    • Component search works more reliably and ignores capitalization, diacritics and spaces

  • Logging

    • Record system version changes to Audit Log (e.g. FlowBox upgrades)
    • Fix some settings changes not logged to AuditLog

  • History

    • New format for history XLS/CSV exports, with a date format better supported by MS Excel
    • Harmonization of some chart colors

  • Validations

    • Value validators can now be reversed (e.g. to define a forbidden range)

  • System Info

    • Clicking the system version in the settings sidebar now opens System Info
    • The System Info component now has a panel widget and a setting panel

  • Other component improvements

    • Added MotorHours feature to Motion component (measure time in ON state, count number of starts)
    • SubPLC SDS MACRO-ST – support for 2 DOUTs and 4 PWMs added
    • Weather forecast component can now show forecasts in charts
    • Thermostat-type components now have a responsive setting panel that works well on mobile
    • Allow defining a custom unit in the Variable component using the JSON editor, e.g. custom:ppm/h. This then shows on the panel widget and in charts.
    • Added elevation field to WeatherForecast for pressure correction

  • Expressions

    • Updated “.trend()” pin modifier to get a trendline from historical data
    • New timestamp keywords: MIDNIGHT, MONTH_START, YEAR_START, QUARTER_START
    • New functions allowed in expressions: date(), strtotime(), ftime()
    • Better support for string arguments in pin modifiers and commands
    • Pin modifiers .trend(), .max(), .min(), .avg(), .since() now accept both absolute and relative times, using strtotime() internally when needed