Hi guys,

Was wondering if any of you have already used Webport/eWON products?

A colleague of mine in Europe recommended it but not sure....can anyone help...

thanks
Paul

 

I had a horrible experience with them about five years ago. I ordered two units but someone (distributor/partner/mfgr) entered the order for one. It took several weeks to arrive because they maintain no stock at their US partner.

The unit didn’t function correctly, when I worked with the US partner to try to resolve they had an almost endless list of things for me to try to see if it could be resolved. They simply would not believe me when I told them the item was faulty even though it rattled! Then when after a week or two I was finally able to convince them to send me another unit, it was impossible because the Belgians at the manufacturer had gone on vacation. All of them. Every single one. I suggested that in America, we’ve learned that it’s not a good idea to send every soul in the company on vacation simultaneously, and that even if it were a good idea, it should be limited to companies that can master things like entering the right quantity on an order and shipping working parts, so you don’t have people still waiting in January or February who don’t even have sample parts from an order they placed in October or November.

The unit is made of a piece of extruded rectangular tubing with plates screwed to the ends. The front has most of the connections and indicators and the back has a DIN rail clip. There is supposed to be an adhesive label on the front. The piece I received was scuffed, had no label, was missing the 24V phoenix connector, and rattled. No big deal from a technical perspective except the rattling, but the overall impression was that they had sent me a unit that had been in internal use as a sample for some reason. Usable (if it worked) but not a good mark for the mfgr/channel.

Then configuration of the devices I purchased (Modbus TCP to MPI bridge) is done with files which are uploaded to an FTP server in the device. So far so good. The taglist is a CSV, which would imply a text file with one record per line, fields delimited by commas. That’s exactly what it is, except it’s delimited by semicolons! So now between the closeness of the file format and the extension, Excel is able to open the file with no problem, and since the delimiter character isn’t displayed, you have no idea of there’s a problem at this point. So you add your tags, save the file, upload to the device, and it doesn’t work! Excel, due to the extension, saves the file with commas for delimiters. Bad Bill Gates, Bad! Why would you assume that because a file format is named “Comma Separated Values” it has commas for delimiters?? ACTL should have simply used commas (duh), or used a different extension for the file. Shouldn’t that have been obvious? That cost me like half a day.

So then the unit failed within the first year after commissioning (possibly not due to any fault of the product itself). Many controls manufacturers are warranting parts for more than a year from the date of sale to the integrator or OEM to cover the time it takes to build the machine. But ACTL, oh no! They don’t even live up to the old norm of starting the warranty clock when the product moves from the distributor to the machine builder. They count the warranty from the date of MANUFACTURE!! So any time the device spends on their shelf, and time it might spend on the US partner’s shelf because they’re trying to protect their customers from ACTL’s business model the warranty clock is ticking the whole time.

All in all, this product probably cost me a couple hundred hours extra work compared to what integration would have required had everything been right. To their credit, someone in the US distribution chain, either Spectrum Controls or my distributor, stepped up and gave us the second one at no charge in view of the hundreds of hours the fiasco cost us that it shouldn’t have. So I’m not too angry at the US companies involved, but my impression is that ACTL is arrogant and believes themselves to be above the customers, and the US partner could be a buffer and hide some of that arrogance but chooses not to do so for products that won’t ever achieve high sales volume in the US.

 

In reply to Steve Myres: I can't comment on Webport/eWON, but I know a bit about your problem with CSV files. I have run into this exact same problem before with other systems, so it's not something unique to Webport/eWON.

MS Excel will use either commas or semi-colons depending on the "region" (language) settings you set in your computer. If ACTL had used comma, then most of their customers in Europe would have complained that the file wasn't compatible with MS Excel!

There was another ASCII export format called DIF (Data Interchange Format) which is what other spreadsheets used to exchange data back in the days when there was more choice. Microsoft promoted CSV as their preferred format, which was probably a dumb idea for spreadsheets considering that in much of the world commas are used as decimal separators.

 

It seems like all they would have had to do is make the hardware accept either commas or semicolons, or else keep the same format but use a file extension that doesn't lead Excel to make potentially incorrect assumptions about the format.

 

Siemens still uses DIF's as their docs export format in the S7. Excel slurps it up like nobody's business. Those would have been fine too.

 

Despite the name, there is actually no "standard" delimiter for CSV files. Even Microsoft's own products don't use the same delimiter all the time.

OpenOffice Calc asks you what delimiter you want to use when you save a CSV file. That can be a good (zero cost) solution if you ever have this problem.

 

I disagree. Common sense and the name form a "standard" whether one wants to follow it or not. The situation you're describing is more like a standard a lot of people ignore, rather than a lack of a standard.

 

Hi Steve,

Thanks for this info...but I also heard that they're going to open a branch of their company in the US; so maybe it will be best when they open....but every employee going on holiday at the same time!!! so european!

Paul

 

Dear Mike,

Let me jump into this thread by first introducing myself. I’m Francis Vanderghinst, eWON’s Sales Manager.
When I read your message it looks that you hit Murphy’s law power two.

We are really sorry for the very bad experience that you encountered 5 years ago.

5 years ago and it is still the case, our local partner did not sales the MPI products. So I believe that in order to reply to your request for MPI product, the order was exceptionally to arrange from Europe but obviously everything when wrong.

The mistake was with no doubt to accept your order since we could not fulfill it properly. Quality is the top priority/value for eWON and we have made tremendous progresses during the last years and this should not happen again.

Again, please accept all our apologies for this. Please contact me directly if you have further question on that case.

The matter of fact is that the combination of quality and innovative product has made eWON the European leader.
In order to better serve our customers on the US market, we have established a sales and support office in Pittsburgh, PA (see our Press Release on www.ewon.biz )
Good news, eWON Inc. gives you accept to the full eWON product range including the MPI versions. The warranty is of course taken as from the date of sale and last for 18 months.

So if we could help you today in any way with our products, do not hesitate to give us a call. We will be pleased that you could reconsider your position about our services
Contact: Dominique Blanc, General Manager for eWON Inc., [email protected]

Best regards,
Francis Vanderghinst

 

Hi guys,

Just wanted to jump into this conversation.
We have been using eWON/webport routers for 2-3 years now, and we're very pleased with them.

Thanks to them and the Talk2M service, we've been able, in a very easy and practical way, to follow our machines all over the world.

It has really been a sound investment. It allows us to avoid costly on-site visits and saves us time. It really is practical.

I don't know what kind of problem you had but we certainly are pleased with the products.

Brian

 

I want to thank the contributors for the discussion involving comma vs non-comma delimited spreadsheet files.

I thought .csv meant comma separated variable . .

 

"I thought .csv meant comma separated variable . . "

It DOES. Apparently to Europeans that's a suggestion rather than to be taken literally. Evidently, they couldn't afford a new, truthful extension, such as "SSV".

 

CSV files were (and still are) commonly used as a spreadsheet data interchange format. However, commas won't work reliably, because in much of the world a comma is used as a decimal separator and the most common data found is a spreadsheet is numbers with decimal separators in them. That means you end up with commas on the middle of the data, and the file parser doesn't know where the fields start and end.

I've used comma separated data, but only in cases where I control the data format exactly. It is actually not even theoretically possible to parse an arbitrary CSV file with any certainty. Even specialist third party libraries will claim they'll only make a good effort at it. The format simply doesn't work for arbitrary data.

One of the worst offenders is Microsoft Excel. Microsoft does not use a consistent CSV file format, but rather changes the separators depending on the local settings on your computer. That means if you might create a CSV file using MS Excel on one computer and then read it in the same version of MS Excel on another computer, and find that the two copies of the same program disagree on what the file format should be. Mr. Myres might want to notice that "Europeans" cannot be blamed for this situation.

However people will use CSV as a format simply because it's simply so convenient to be able to use a spreadsheet to read and write these files. It's unfortunate that the most widely use spreadsheet takes a schizophrenic attitude towards file formats, but it does and everyone else is left to try to work around it.

OpenOffice Calc at least asks you what separator you want to use when you save a CSV file. It's probably the best solution in this situation.

There *are* file formats which do work and which do avoid these problems. That's a long discussion in itself however, so I won't go into that now.

 

Red herring, Michael. Excel's handling of the file type may be less than optimal, but ACTL (Ewon) could have easily avoided the problem for their customers by choosing a file format that wouldn't mislead their customers (well, potential customers in the US at least) and Excel. They could have called it an SSV and Excel would have still opened it and saved it, but without the trouble we have here.

 

Mr. Vanderghinst,

Thank you for your reply, and I apologize for not yet having responded. I do feel your post worthy of a reply and will do so but it will take a half hour or so to organize my responses to all the things you've said, so it will have to wait till I have a bit of time.