5.0 Release

VOLTTRON 5.0 ties together several important new features that have been developed throughout the year which improve performance, usability, and flexibility. These features have been developed with backwards compatibility in mind and are either optional or require no changes to use. After updating to 5.0, agents should be rebuilt but require no changes to code.

This is the full release for the 5.0 version of VOLTTRON. This full release incorporates numerous fixes and feedback from users during the release candidate period.

The major changes from RC2 include:

• Fixed an agent lifecycle bug which could cause agents to not shut down cleanly. This could affect historians and lead to data loss
• Incorporated ModbusTK driver
• Incorporated OpenADR VTN and VEN agent
• VOLTTRON Central BACnet device discovery code refactored

To see the commit log between this release and the rc2 release:
5.0rc2...releases/5.0rc

VOLTTRON 5.0 RC2

VOLTTRON 5.0 ties together several important new features that have been developed throughout the year which improve performance, usability, and flexibility. These features have been developed with backwards compatibility in mind and are either optional or require no changes to use. After updating to 5.0, agents should be rebuilt but require no changes to code.

This is the second release candidate for the 5.0 version of VOLTTRON. This release touches a large number of files primarily because the VOLTTRON license has been changed to an Apache 2.0 license.

The following bugs/housekeeping items were fixed during the rc1 period:

• Bacnet scanning in volttron central has been updated to use the same code that the command line bacnet scan uses.
• Documentation was updated to allow better navigation in the workthroughs/ide setups.
• Tagging documentation was updated.
• ./start-volttron and ./stop-volttron scripts were added to aide in simple starting stopping of single instances (be sure to look at what these do before using in production)
• pycharm-launch script - added option to explicitly not include a config file from the root of the agent directory.
• bug fixed for thread (documentation bug) for low powered systems.

Additional agents added:

• Market service agent and base agent with examples
• A contributed Kafka agent.

To see the commit log between this release and the rc1 release: 5.0rc1...5.0rc2

Known Issues

• The simple web example has been broken by an api change that allows the user to specify return type, status and response headers. This will be fixed before the 5.0 final release.

VOLTTRON 5.0 RC1

VOLTTRON 5.0 ties together several important new features that have been developed throughout the year which improve performance, usability, and flexibility. These features have been developed with backwards compatibility in mind and are either optional or require no changes to use. After updating to 5.0, agents should be rebuilt but require no changes to code.

VOLTTRON 5.0 is being released as a release candidate prior to becoming the default version for the repository. This is to give the community time to try out the new features and provide feedback.

Major new features include:

• Message Bus performance improvements
  • A major refactor of the message bus improves the speed of publishes by 4 - 10 times
  • Requires no changes to existing agents and services to use
• Simplified Multi-Platform
  • Platforms can be configured as peers allowing their topics to be shared across participating platforms
  • Agents can publish/subscribe to remote topics without knowing which platform the topic is on
• Tagging Service
  • Topics can be assigned metadata tags
  • Agents can lookup topics by these tags to dynamically configure their subscriptions

Other improvements include:

• Historians
  • Historians utilize configuration store
  • Crate historian solidified and ready for deployment
  • ForwardHistorian improvements including option to pause forwarding
  • Significant ForwardHistorian and DataMover memory and file handler leak fixed. Affected spotty connection and cases where the target platform may be disconnected for long periods of time.
  • DataMover historian provides an alternative to FowardHistorian for remotely storing data without needing to republish it
• Drivers
  • SEP2.0 historian contributed
  • Ability to group devices to allow load balancing of scraping to avoid overloading devices and networks (developed to alleviate issues collecting from MS-TP trunk)
• Documentation
  • Jupyter training notebooks for quickstart of learning VOLTTRON
• Message bus debugging tool to provide visibility during application development

VOLTTRON 4.1 Release

The official 4.1 release contains the following:

• Platform Upgrades

  • Fixed a bug that created a memory leak in less reliable networks
  • Added aliases for volttron-ctl, volttron-cfg and volttron-pkg (vctl, vcfg, and vpkg respectively)
  • New install-agent script - allows easier scripting of agent installations for larger deployments
  • Made it easier to authorize external agent connections using the following commands
  • Added new commands for exposing auth related information:
    • vctl auth publickey
    • vctl auth serverkey
  • Added volttron-start and volttron-stop scripts for consistent starting and stopping of the platform without having to be in an activated environment.

• VOLTTRON Central

  • Swapped out a memory leaking charting library for a new one
  • Added Device Configuration UI which allows remote BACnet device detection and driver setup
  • Only the connecting platform has the ability to register with VOLTTRON Central .

• Historians

  • Improved performance of the backup cache
  • Improved performance of the MongoDB historian (Used by PNNL with over 2.5 billion datapoints currently)
  • Added Crate historian
  • Updated ForwardHistorian - can now be configured to verify specific agents are running on the remote instance.

• Drivers

  • Improved command line BACnet scan for large scale deployments
  • Better performance on low power devices which do not implement the entire BACnet interface

• New Core Agents

  • AgentWatcher - Sends alerts when configured agent identities are not present on the message bus.
  • ThresholdAgent - Sends alerts when configured topics are out of specified range.
  • EmailerAgent - Emails administrators when alerts happen (has a time delay mechanism so that admins aren't spammed by the same error)

Issues Resolved 4.1 release https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron/issues?q=is%3Aissue+milestone%3A%22VOLTTRON+4.1%22+is%3Aclosed
Commits since 4.0.1 release releases/4.0.1...releases/4.1

VOLTTRON 4.0

In addition to the changes made in the 4.0-beta release, the following modifications have been made.

• Applications are broken out into their own repository: https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron-applications
• Some commands have been broken out into their own subcommands (for instance, volttron-ctl serverkey is now under volttron-ctl auth serverkey)
• Configuration Store for dynamically updating agent configurations
• VOLTTRON configuration wizard allows for more agent setups.
• Added volttron-ctl update command to update agents. Using this command does not lose the public/private keypair when installing agents.

API Changes

• Keystore public() method has been changed to a property.

Known Issues (VC and VCP issues are slated to be better handled in the coming weeks)

• #962 Issue connecting to some peers on platforms.
• #961 Management UI hangs when opening a platform with a fakedriver
• #956 MODBUS driver issue with non sequential registers
• Pre-authorizing needs to take place in order for communication from VCP and VC can be easily done.
• Unregistering platforms does not work through VC.
• Device management UI still in progress and will be part of the next point released.

VOLTTRON 4.0-patch

Continued testing and deployment since the 4.0 release has identified issues which require a patch. There should be no comparability issues with this and the 4.0 release. The only required action is to restart the VOLTTRON instance and agents after pulling the new changes into your local copy. If you are operating from source, please replace the 4.0 source with this.

Note this release is off master not develop.

The specific issues identified can be reviewed here: https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron/milestone/18

To see a diff of actual changes you may compare using the following:
62c7666...master

VOLTTRON 4.0 beta

Today the VOLTTRON team is proud to announce the release of VOLTTRON 4.0 beta. This is a culmination of the last half of year since the 3.5RC1 release. We have added made working with VOLTTRON a much easier experience as well as added new features. Backwards compatibility is maintained where possible but some features do require changes. These changes are not as drastic as the 2.0 to 3.0 upgrade and we will have documentation on upgrade paths by the time of the full release.

• All documentation will now be maintained on http://volttron.readthedocs.io and the old github wiki will be deprecated. The goal is to have a single source of documentation that track multiple branches of source code.
• One of the biggest changes is the introduction of the Configuration Store. Eventually agents will be able to be configured in a running state. This potentially will allow you to not have to package a configuration file with your agent. This greatly enhances the flexibility and configurability of the drivers, however, this change is not backwards compatible with your current master driver. There is a script (https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron/blob/develop/scripts/update_master_driver_config.py) that will do the update for you entirely. You can read about the specification for the configuration store http://volttron.readthedocs.io/en/develop/core_services/config_store/Commandline-Interface.html and read how to use the config store from the platform http://volttron.readthedocs.io/en/develop/specifications/configuration-store.html.
• Cloning the main VOLTTRON repository will not get you the applications. Those have been moved to their own repository at https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron-applications
• The auth command has been moved to be a subcommand. So volttron-ctl auth-add has become volttron-ctl auth add. This auth is now documented http://volttron.readthedocs.io/en/develop/core_services/control/PlatformCommands.html.
• The volttron-ctl serverkey command has been moved under the auth subcommand. So to get the serverkey of the current platform you can execute volttron-ctl auth serverkey.
• VIP IDENTITY has matured and is now guaranteed to be unique on a platform both at installation and run-time. The generated identities are now based upon the agent name. This allows a constant convention for determining agent ids. The spec for VIP IDENTITIES is at http://volttron.readthedocs.io/en/develop/specifications/agent-vip-id.html. Note the volttron-ctl status command has been improved to show the agent identity.
• We have enhanced the volttron-cfg command to be more flexible and allow extensions to the platform to be built rapidly. You can setup and configure an instance by answering a few questions instead of having to edit configuration files. Note you will still need to modify the config files for advanced setups.
• VOLTTRON configuration wizard (volttron-cfg) allows setting up a simple platform for demonstration and simplifies muilti-platform deployments
• Improved robustness of VOLTTRON Central Management UI
• More reliable mechanism for transferring agents for remote install
• AggregatorAgent which aggregates specified data points and stores in a new table

VOLTTRON 3.5 Release Candidate 1

This release candidate is the culmination of development efforts since the release of 3.0. It is being released as a candidate to give the community a chance to explore the new capabilities and changes to existing features before it becomes the new main (master) branch. Additionally, RC1 will be utilized in PNNL's campus deployment to verify stability.

• VOLTTRON Central Management
  • Simplified platform registration through using a keystore
  • Resource tree view for status of VOLTTRON deployment
  • Data points can be charted through selection in tree
  • Alerts system allows agents to throw alerts when they encounter errors
• Drivers
  • Improved robustness of BACnet configuration generator
  • BACnet priority for points is now configurable
  • Devices can be returned to a "default state" defined by the driver
• Historians
  • MongoDB Historian added
  • Metadata being stored
  • Performance enhancements based on scalability results
  • ForwardHistorian refactored to be more general and reliable
• Simulation interaction
  • MATLab interface allows models to interact with VOLTTRON message bus
• Security
  • Agents can restrict access to their capabilities based on authorized actors
• Test Suite
  • New VOLTTRON test suite for testing the platform code
  • Tests can be used to check contributed services for compatibility
• Example Agents
  • Fake driver to provide a minimal driver implementation example and mock data for exploring the platform
  • Updated example for using the Actuator highlighting the new RPC interface for simplifying interaction
  • ExampleSubscriber agent which provides an all-in-one example of publish and subscribing by providing its own fake device data

VOLTTRON 3.5-beta

• VOLTTRON Central Management
  • Simplified platform registration through using a keystore
  • Resource tree view for status of VOLTTRON deployment
  • Alerts system allows agents to throw alerts when they encounter errors
• Drivers
  • Improved robustness of BACnet configuration generator
  • BACnet priority for points is now configurable
  • Devices can be returned to a "default state" defined by the driver
• Historians
  • MongoDB Historian added
  • Metadata being stored
  • Performance enhancements based on scalability results
  • ForwardHistorian refactored to be more general and reliable
• Security
  • Agents can restrict access to their capabilities based on authorized actors
• Test Suite
  • New VOLTTRON test suite for testing the platform code
  • Tests can be used to check contributed services for compatibility
• Example Agents
  • Fake driver to provide a minimal driver implementation example and mock data for exploring the platform
  • Updated example for using the Actuator highlighting the new RPC interface for simplifying interaction
  • ExampleSubscriber agent which provides an all-in-one example of publish and subscribing by providing its own fake device data

Hotfix for Actuator Agent and Historian

This release addresses bug #223 in the Actuator where agents could issue control actions despite not having a reservation. This has been fixed and now agent must have scheduled a reservation prior to issuing commands.

This release also addresses issue #234 caused where changing the case of topic names in drivers causes a conflict in the historian. For instance, if the driver config for "mytopic" becomes "MyTopic" and the historian would error when encountering this "duplicate filename".

The fix for issue #226 ensures that the required library pytz is installed even when numpy is not.