Weatherford 8500

Product Overview

The Weatherford 8500 driver enables the monitoring of real-time data and immediate control of Rod Pump Controller (RPC) devices and other Weatherford controllers used at wellhead facilities. It provides an easy and reliable way to read and write data to Weatherford series devices via the Weatherford 8500 protocol through client applications (including HMI, SCADA, Historian, MES, ERP, and countless custom applications).

• Supports up to 256 communication channels and up to 4095 devices/controllers
• Supports data acquisition for Downhole Dynagraph data
• Supports event directory retrieval
• Supports surface and downhole card retrieval
• Supports valve check data item syntax
• Supports Advanced Statistics Tags, including _CommFailures, _ErrorResponses, and more
• Optimized for extreme conditions (noisy communication channels and low-bandwidth).
• Ethernet Encapsulation
• Modem Support
• Automatic Tag Generation
• Automatic Device Demotion
• Channel Virtualization/Serialization
• Device Level and Communications Path Based Redundancy.
• Communication Serialization

• Weatherford 8500 Protocol

• 8500/8650
• 8750
• 8800
• ePIC RPC
• M2000
• WellPilot RPOC
• WellPilot/ePIC VSD

• English

• DDE Format CF_Text and AdvancedDDE
• NIO Interface for iFIX
• OPC .NET Service (OPC .NET) Version 1.00
• OPC Alarms and Events (OPC AE) Version 1.10
• OPC Data Access (OPC DA) Versions 1.0a, 2.0, 2.05a, and 3.0
• OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) Clients
• SuiteLink and FastDDE for Wonderware

• Weatherford 8500 Manual

6.13.266.0

3/23/2023

• Fixed an issue timing out when the PLC connects, but refuses the request.

6.10.623.0

2/23/2021

• Removed non-inclusive terms out of respect for users of our software.

6.9.572.0

6/2/2020

• Fixed an issue where the Request Timeout was incorrectly used instead of the Connect Timeout when the driver was not connected.

6.7.1046.0

6/27/2019

• Expanded the Connect Attempts feature introduced for Ethernet Encapsulation in the 6.6.348.0 release to honor the connection timeout when not connected. 

6.6.348.0

11/14/2018

• Added a Connect Attempts setting to specify the maximum number of tries. The new setting is in the Timing group of device properties available when the connection type is Ethernet Encapsulation.

6.1.601.0

4/4/2017

• Increased the channel limit from 256 to 1024.

5.20.396.0

5/3/2016

• Added the ability to format Date and Time values as ACSII numeric strings.

5.19.467.0

10/20/2015

• Added support for Advanced Statistics Tags, including _CommFailures, _ErrorResponses, and more.
• Enhanced the driver to allow the RTU P619 value to be queried prior to a Dynagraph request. The result of this request determines the “position inclusion and type character” parameter when building the Dynagraph transaction.

5.10.205

11/13/2012

Updated the driver with the new Connection Sharing feature.

5.9.170

6/26/2012

Added the new device-level internal tag "_FailedConnection" that indicates the driver failed on its attempt to connect to the device.

5.8.109.0

2/21/2012

Fixed a Communication Serialization bug that prevented the driver from releasing communication control when there were many memory and/or Write Only tags with scan rates.

5.7.84.0

10/24/2011

• Added channel serialization.
• Added support for the following models: EPIC, M2000, WellPilot Classic, 8800, 8750, 8650, and 8500.
• Added Inter-Device Delay

5.6.122.0

7/25/2011

• New serial driver that allows the 8500 Protocol to communicate with Weatherford model 8500 RPOC controllers. Ethernet Encapsulation is supported.

• Oil and Gas Suite