Greetings to all our Technology Agreement subscribers

Once again the shimmering heat of summer has arrived and with it I am once again wishing that I
too lived in a land in which an afternoon siesta was recognised as a necessity. Fortunately the heat
is not incapacitating the Adroit team, if anything it is causing them to work harder than ever before,
resulting in the addition of many new and exciting features to the Adroit product, some of which are
discussed in this newsletter. Please inform us of any improvements that we can make to the content
of these TA Updates so that we can customise these newsletters to suit your needs. Contributions
are also gladly welcome and we will publish any inventive methods for accomplishing tasks using
Adroit.

Technology Agreement Inquiries

For any technology agreement inquiries, please contact TrayC Herbert on (011) 781-3513 during
office hours or on her cell phone 083 303 4421, alternatively e-mail her at traych@adroit.co.za

Adroit Support Statistics

The following bar graph represents the distribution of the questions answered by the Adroit support
department, for the last three months.

This graph was generated by OPUS and has allowed us to identify the areas of the product where
we need to focus our attention, as such we are currently investing resources into making the drivers
easier to use and support and in improving the help provided when configuring agents.
Adroit Updates

PLEASE NOTE: Do NOT install Adroit on SQL Server 6.5/7.0 clustered servers, since this will
involve the installation of Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.5x or later, which may
cause a catastrophic failure of the SQL Server cluster, SQL Server Agent or other SQL Server
services. For more information, please see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 820754.

Adroit 5.0

Update 4 is available for downloading, along with the Adroit 5 manual, from this web address:
http://www.adroit.co.za/downloads/5_0.html.

PLEASE NOTE: Once MIMIC and TREND windows are saved with Adroit version 5.0.4 they will not
be compatible with previous versions of Adroit. Users who are upgrading to Adroit 5.0.4 should
therefore backup their data before applying the update. You can use the Adroit backup utility to
assist you with making such a backup.
Refer to the Adroit 5.0.4 Enhancements section below for a description of some of the
enhancements that have been made to Adroit in this update.

PLEASE NOTE: A text file called 'Adroit504.txt’ is also available for download from this web address,
which contains a brief description of all the fixes and enhancements that have been made to the
product by the Adroit 5.0.4 update, so that you can quickly determine if you need to download this
update or not. This is also shipped on the Adroit 5.0.4 CD release in the Update folder.

The Adroit 5.0.4 update now includes the latest help file and is available in a self-extracting
compressed format, either as a single 7.78MB file, called update.exe or sized to fit onto six 1.44MB
3.5" disks for portability, these are named update_disk#.exe, where # is a number from 1 to 6. Either
execute the single update.exe file or execute each of the update_disk#.exe files, IN ORDER from 1
to 6 using the SAME temporary folder, to begin the installation of the update. Follow the displayed
instructions and install this update into your Adroit System folder, this is typically: C:\Adroit.

Alternatively, if you require this update on CD, please contact your sales
Engineer at Adroit Technologies. Please note that this update is located in the Update folder on the
CD and must be separately installed.

Note: If features are added to the Adroit installation, from the original CD, after Adroit has been
updated, then it may be necessary to re-apply the latest Adroit Update.

PLEASE NOTE1: From the CD release of Adroit 5.0.4 onwards:

• Adroit can be installed upon the Windows Server 2003 operating system. If you do attempt to
install an earlier Adroit 5 release on this operating system, the installation will fail. If you try to run
Adroit 5.0.3a and earlier on Windows Server 2003, the HASP will also not work. The new
Windows Server 2003 compatible HASP driver (version 4.95) now ships on the Adroit 5.0.4 CDs.
• If you need to connect to Microsoft Access databases, then you must manually install the Jet
drivers. The latest Jet update (SP7) is operating system specific and is available on the Adroit
5.0.4 CD in the following folder: Utilities\Jet4ServicePack7, read the readme.txt file in this folder
for necessary installation instructions.

PLEASE NOTE2: It is important to backup the Adroit registry BEFORE removing Adroit 5 from your
machine, unless Adroit 5.0.4 or later was initially installed.
Adroit 4.2

The update 12b is available for downloading from this web address:
http://www.adroit.co.za/downloads/4_2.html . This update is available in a selfextracting compressed
format, either as a single 6.6 MB file, called update.exe or it has been sized to fit onto six 3.5’” disks
for portability, these are named update_disk#.exe, where # is the number of disks, from 1 to 6.
Please ensure that these separate update files are extracted into the same folder on the hard drive
before executing the setup.exe file.
Alternatively, if you require this update on CD, please contact your sales engineer at Adroit
Technologies. Please note that this update is located in the Update folder on the CD and must be
separately installed.

Post Updating Check

Once you have completed the update installation, a quick way of checking that the installation is
operating optimally is to do the following:
• Run the Adroit Setup
• Click the About button.
If you see a Details button you have a problem-otherwise you can be reasonably sure that the
installation was successful.

New and Updated Drivers

There are 76 drivers available for downloading from this web address:
http://www.adroit.co.za/Drivers/drivers.ASP . This page contains the latest Adroit drivers and
includes a combination of both Adroit version 4.2 and 5.0 drivers, which are totally compatible and
interchangeable.

Note 1: Since Adroit version 5.0 no longer supports Windows 95 and 98, some drivers may
obviously not be used in their Windows 95/98 form.
Note 2: Adroit 4.2 CDs only contain critical driver updates and drivers should be used from Adroit
5.0 CDs, if patches are required.
Note 3: Drivers for Adroit 4.1 and earlier are available only on request.

The following drivers and/or their documentation have been modified since the last TA
Update: Modbus I (RTU and ASCII) Protocol Driver,
and Spectrum Tele-RANGER Protocol Driver.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to installation file format changes, installing any drivers that utilise 3rd party
software, from the CD release of Adroit 5.0.4 onwards, onto earlier Adroit systems will generate an
error. Either update to Adroit 5.0.4 first or install the files manually or download the required driver
from the Adroit web site (www.adroit.co.za/drivers/drivers.asp). For assistance contact the driver
department at drivers@adroit.co.za.
Adroit 5.0.4 Enhancements

Trend windows in Adroit 5.0.4 are now able to display customizable formats in which the value (y)
axis scale values and the pen values displayed in the legend and in their bookmarks can now be
formatted to appear in hex, floating-point or even binary formats e.g. in the example below when
trending the rawvalue slots of the Multistate or Marshal agents.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to this change, the trends of Adroit 5.0.4 will be incompatible with all previous
versions, hence once a trend has been upgraded it can no longer be used in a previous version of
Adroit.

In the last two to three months, a number of customers have been reporting that the opening and
closing of mimics is taking longer - anything up to 3 seconds as opposed to the "virtually
instantaneous" operation which they had become accustomed to with Adroit. While mimics would
open very quickly, it would take anything up to 3 seconds for all grey items to appear in their normal
colours.

Closing of mimics using "Close" buttons also tended to take anything up to 3 seconds.
We are happy to report that this issue has been resolved and the fix will be available from Adroit
5.0.4 and that the problem was not introduced as a result of recent fixes or updates to Adroit or a
symptom introduced specifically in Adroit 5.0. The symptom is faithfully reproduced with Adroit 4.2 or
5.0 on the faster, entry level, PC's that are coming onto the market today.

For example, we were unable to reproduce the problem on an Intel P4 1.6GHz PC while it was easily
reproduced on an Intel P4 2.0GHz PC. Adroit 4.2 users will notice the same problem if they upgrade
their hardware to these faster PC's.

Should any of you be seriously hindered by the above problem, we would be happy to consider
making the patch available. Please email your requests to support@adroit.co.za.

Have you ever wanted to change the behaviour or property of a picture element buried deep within
one of your mimics and wished that there was some way to reach it without having to break the
cell(s) in which it was placed?

Well in Adroit 5.0.4, this formerly arduous activity will no longer be necessary, due to the advent of
the mimic explorer, which allows the selection and modification of any picture element in a mimic via
a simple tree or explorer view window of the required mimic or picture element, simply click on the
required picture element in the explorer tree and it will be highlighted in the mimic. Right-clicking this
picture element will allow it to be deleted or its properties and behaviours to be modified as
required, as follows:

PLEASE NOTE: Due to this change, the mimics and wizards of Adroit 5.0.4 will be incompatible with
all previous versions, hence once a mimic or wizard has been upgraded it can no longer be used in a
previous version of Adroit.

The Driver installation dialog of the Adroit Setup utility has also been given a face-lift in order to
improve your Adroit experience, in making the installation of protocol drivers and their devices more
intuitive and making their diagnostic and help functions easier to access. Please read about these
changes in the Adroit help file, which is included in the latest update.

Hot Tips and Tricks

To further assist, you the user, with drivers and driver-related problems, please take note of the
following recommendations from our driver department:

1. If a device is off-line, un-available or disconnected, then it should be stopped, since both Adroit
and the driver will continue to attempt to resume communications to the exclusion of most other
functions of the scanning sub-system, thereby consuming valuable system resources. Hence
functions such as adding and removing I/O while in "recover connection" mode will not perform
optimally.
2. It is also recommended to stop the Device agent when adding, importing and removing more
than one scan-point.

Since the use of OPC is increasing, please be aware of the following related issues:

1. Ensure that your OPC server is OPC 2.0 compliant, if you intend connecting to OPC clients
from across the network, since the OPC 1.0 specification ONLY supports local (same PC)
client connections.
2. Concerning the use of the Adroit OPC item browser:
 a. When adding a scan point to an Adroit OPC client driver device, click the browse button
next to the Address field, to browse in the required OPC item using this OPC item
browser application.
b. The OPC item browser can also be run in stand-alone mode so that you do not need to
open this tag browser for each OPC item that is to be added, simply create a shortcut to
the “opcbrowser.exe” program, located in the Adroit system folder and launch it.
Note: The OPC browser is now included in the Utilities folder of the Adroit 5 program
group in the Start menu, from the CD release of Adroit 5.0.4 onwards.
c. The OPC item browser does not support a connection to a remote OPC server. It only
does so if the remote OPC server has been configured as a valid Adroit device whereby
you can add the following command line parameter to the shortcut used to launch this
program (see point 2 above) as follows: opcbrowser /d:devicename, where devicename
is the name of the device associated with the remote OPC server.
Note: The speed of browsing is a function of the OPC item database size and the OPC
server itself and not the Adroit OPC item browser.
3. Concerning the use of the Adroit OPC Client driver:
a. By default this driver is optimized to not interpret the OPC timestamp, therefore to be able
to receive the correct timestamps from the OPC server, when configuring the device, click
on the "Advanced" button and check the "Use timestamps from OPC server" checkbox.
b. When using the OPC client driver, is it possible to start up the Agent Server and find that
all of the scan-points have disappeared, because if the OPC Server could not load, or
could not "test" that the I/O exists then the scan points are discarded. To work-around
this, configure the device, click on the "Advanced" button and check the "Do not validate
items" checkbox once the commissioning is complete. However, this will not resolve
problems when a remote OPC server is unavailable, in this case ensure that the WGP file
does not get saved, and revert to a backed up WGP once the OPC Server fault is
rectified.

Lastly, for something completely different, when drawing mimics it is possible to create rectangles

with rounded corners e.g. , to do this:

• Open the required Mimic window, click the Windows properties toolbar button and
ensure that the Scale lines checkbox is enabled in the General page.
• Double click the required Rectangle picture element(s) and ensure that the Rounded
corners checkbox is enabled.
• Save the changes that have been made to this Mimic window.

Adroit Technologies

PO Box 483, Pinegowrie, 2123, South Africa

Tel: +27 11 781 3513 Fax: +27 11 886 4097
E-mail: info@adroit.co.za www.adroit.co.za