November 2, 2020

The new release of Factory I/O 2.4.4 is now available for download. This release includes a new driver for S7-PLCSIM Advanced, improved OPC UA/DA drivers and several bug fixes and improvements.

Core

• Fixed crash when a dragged item is deleted by a remover.
• Fixed errors when opening v1.x scenes.
• Added scene.start_tag_export(filename, interval) and scene.stop_tag_export() console commands to allow exporting tag values at repeated intervals.
• Added physics.solver_iterations console command to allow changing the number of iterations of the physics constraint solver for contact and joint constraints.
• Moved scene.quit() and scene.force_quit() console commands to app.quit() and app.force_quit().

Drivers

• Added driver for S7-PLCSIM Advanced v3.0
• Redesigned OPC DA driver which is now faster and more robust - it now works correctly with RSLinx Classic.
• Improved performance when browsing nodes on OPC UA servers.
• OPC items/nodes now show correctly data types following the IEC61131 standard.
• Improved performance of the Open and Control IO drivers.
• Lowered the .NET Framework version requirement for external drivers to 4.6.2.
• Fixed crash by repeatedly showing an error message in Allen-Bradley drivers.
• Fixed read errors not being correctly displayed on OPC UA driver.

UI

• Fixed scene preview grid order after saving a scene.
• Fixed scene preview grid not updating if hidden when window is resized.

Licensing

• Floating licenses are now more resilient during system shutdown/crashes.

Installer

• Advantech USD-4704 & USB-4750 device drivers must now be downloaded from the Advantech website and installed manually.