Velos 2025.4 Dairy Farming

This Nedap Velos software version contains new and improved functionalities that provide new solutions, add valuable options to existing solutions and further increase the ease of use of Velos.

Nedap FarmControl

Identification

• The auto configure option of a Rotary Identification behaviour component now works correctly also when the first position has a number greater than one.

• The clear responder functionality on a PPID system of a rotary parlour now also works correctly when the first position has a number greater than one.

Traffic

• The Sorting functionality has been redesigned. All related features are now conveniently grouped under a single menu item: Sorting. This menu item opens a page with four tabs: Quick Sort, Sorting Rules, Animals to Sort, and Sorted Animals.

  The 'Quick Sort' tab allows users to easily enter an animal number and sort the animal with a single click. The action can also be undone just as easily. This feature is especially user-friendly on mobile devices.

  The 'Sorting Rules' tab displays all the sorting rules used to sort the animals.

  The 'Animals to Sort' tab shows all animals currently awaiting sorting, along with their intended destination.

  Finally, the 'Sorted Animals' tab lists all animals that have already been sorted, their destinations, and the date of sorting.

• QuickSort in both the desktop and mobile format

• Sorting rules

• Animals to sort

• Sorted animals

• The redesigned sorting functionality also enables support for complex routing structures on farms. For example, animals passing through a sorting unit can first be directed to a treatment area, and within that area, further routed to specific pens depending on the reason they were sent for treatment.

• The updated sorting system also supports automatic routing of animals from the milking parlor back to their designated pen.

• To support these expanded capabilities, the number of sorting options has been increased from three to six. This means it is now possible to separate animals into six different sorting pens for six different reasons at any given time. Naturally, this requires the farm to have six separate sorting pens and the corresponding sorting units installed.

• The Nedap SmartSort with VP6060 antenna is supported from this version onward. A dedicated behavior component, 'SmartSort', has been added specifically for the Nedap SmartSort unit. This allows optimal use of the new VP6060 antenna and the simplified manual control with a single button.

• In the 2–5 Way Sorter, there was a 2.5-second delay between setting the sort gate and opening the hold gate to prevent a possible collision between the two gates. However, due to the mechanical design, such a collision is not possible in practice. As a result, the sorter appeared to respond very slowly. This 2.5-second delay has now been removed.

Feeding

• Resolved an issue that prevented the feed start calculation from functioning correctly beyond the year 2030.

Nedap CowControl

Heat Detection and Health Monitoring

• When a tag is administratively linked to an animal but no data is received from the tag, the user receives a notification. Previously, this notification was triggered after 24 hours. Due to a recent change in the tag activation algorithm, which now requires more time after the tag is attached to the cow, the notification will now be triggered after 48 hours.

• When Velos is in Nedap Now mode, tag temperature data is sent to the cloud regardless of whether the "temperature data to cloud" item is present in the license.
  In stand alone mode, the data is only sent if this license item is present.

• The 'Handled' tab on the Heat Attentions page has been made read-only when Velos is running in Nedap Now mode. This ensures that no changes can be made on this page in this mode, as such modifications must be performed within the Nedap Now cloud environment.

• The same applies to the 'Automatic Pregnant' option. In Nedap Now mode, this functionality is managed within the cloud environment.

Cow Locating

• During the calibration of the Cow Locating system, all calibration points are by default marked with a yellow dot on the map. As of this version, it is now possible to choose from five predefined colours when creating a calibration responder. This greatly improves map clarity, especially when multiple people are performing the calibration procedure simultaneously. This makes it much easier to spot, for example, if someone accidentally adds a calibration point in an area where someone else is already working.

• Fixed an issue where the Setup Beacons page was visible on all systems, even those without a pen monitoring license.

• The Location Validator behaviour component, which uses a UHF antenna to determine which antenna a SmartTag is near, now supports all types of SmartTags (unencrypted/encrypted, non-subscription/subscription).

• An issue has been resolved that caused items in VPaint to be unclickable, even though they should have been.

• No more attentions are created in the 'Animals at unexpected pen' dashboard widget for animals that were last seen in a sorting pen.

• Since Velos 2025.3, settings were sent twice to the beacons because occasionally a setting was not properly processed in the beacon. However, it has become clear that the beacons do not handle this well, sometimes resulting in them becoming completely unresponsive. Therefore, the duplicate sending of settings has been removed while awaiting a permanent solution in the beacon firmware.

• An issue has been resolved where the calibration page sometimes incorrectly showed a 'Device error' message for beacons.

• An issue has been resolved that caused the State column on the Behaviour Component Overview page to sometimes incorrectly display an exclamation mark for a Positioning Beacon Setup behaviour component, indicating that the associated beacon could not be found.

• When creating a new beacon setup behaviour component, a frequency of 0Hz was temporarily assigned to the beacon, which it could not handle properly. While this will be addressed in the beacon firmware, the system no longer sends the 0Hz value, ensuring the issue is also resolved for beacons with existing firmware.

Nedap MilkingControl

• The Wash Controller behaviour component listens to an external signal indicating when washing is active. It relays this status to the InTouch devices so they can follow the wash mode accordingly. However, it was found that rapid signal changes were not always correctly followed by the InTouch devices. Although the firmware of the InTouch devices has already been updated to address this, the Wash Controller behaviour component will now ignore signal changes that occur faster than one second, ensuring reliable operation in all cases.

• The system attention message "System setup does not allow Auto Calibration calculation", which is related to SmartFlow, no longer appears on systems that do not use SmartFlow at all.

• It is now possible to create or modify a parlour even if the license includes only 'Parlour Monitor' without any other milking-related license options.

General

• Nedap constantly updates the software to prevent security vulnerabilities. In this version some 3rd party libraries have been updated because of vulnerability: CVE-2024-6763 and CVE-2025-41242

• In addition, this version addresses several security-related issues, further enhancing the overall safety and reliability of the system.

• In this version, the functionality that allowed the local system to inform the Nedap Now cloud environment about the capabilities of the SmartTags communicating with the installation has been removed. Since SmartTags transmit this information at long intervals, especially in grazing areas, it could take a significant amount of time before all tag capabilities were known.

  However, the cloud environment already has this information available in a SmartTag production database. As the accuracy of this database continues to improve, the cloud can now use it to instantly determine the capabilities of each SmartTag. If any discrepancies still occur, they will be corrected once the SmartTags send their capabilities.

• An anti-corruption layer has been added to the communication with Nedap Now. As a result, data transfer from the cloud environment to local installations has become significantly more robust and less prone to errors.

• A new, more robust V-Pack update mechanism has been introduced. Instead of transferring updates line by line during the update process, the entire update file is now sent to the V-Pack first, after which the V-Pack performs the upgrade independently. The first V-Pack to support this new mechanism is the VP1004C. Future V-Pack models will also use this update method.

• The 'No animal linked' tab on the Tag Issues page now also indicates whether a tag is an ISO tag based on messages sent by SmartTags containing their hardware type. Previously, this status was determined solely based on detection by an ISO antenna. By including the hardware type information from SmartTags, the ISO status of a tag is now displayed more accurately in the table.

• When the installation is in Nedap Now mode, the farm layout can still be viewed locally, but any changes must now be made in the cloud environment.

• A number of minor issues have been fixed in this version.

  • Resolved an issue where an automatically downloaded update remained visible even after a newer version had been installed manually.

  • The edit license button, represented by the pen icon, is no longer missing from the License Page.

  • On the Identification Overview Page, antennas that are not properly tuned are once again indicated with double red dots instead of blue ones.

  • On the Farm Overview page, when the window width is less than 1880px, the popup with the options 'View on map' and 'Show on list' is now clearly visible again below the 'View animals' button.

  • Failure to set the VPU online address no longer results in an unclear message. The following message will now be displayed:
    "An error occurred trying to submit the VPU-online registration."

  • Tables with no data are now properly aligned on the page again.

  • On the Settings > Calendar > General page, the various attention types are now displayed with the correct names again.

  • After an internet connection interruption, the connection to the cloud environment is now restored again within 5 minutes.

  • When changing the vpu-online configuration, the changes only took effect after a VPU reboot. This has been resolved, and they now take effect immediately.

  • For editing certain behavior components in an installation running in Nedap Now mode, an active connection to the Nedap Now cloud environment is required at the time of editing. Due to an error in the check for an active connection, this did not always work correctly. This issue has now been fixed.

  • A problem has been resolved in Nedap Now installations that use multiple responders per animal. This issue caused continuous synchronization between the cloud and the on-premise system, resulting in consistently high CPU and memory usage.

  • The Nedap Now animal import process was slow because each calendar event was first deleted and then re-added. This has been resolved, significantly speeding up the import.

Taurus

• An issue has been resolved in the Taurus /activity CSV export where the timestamp in each row was linked to the oldest activity value in the row instead of the most recent one.

Firmware

New firmware has been added for the following V-Packs:

• VP8002: v1.00.42

  • Improve peripheral update

Some older firmware versions occasionally caused issues when updating V-Packs in parallel. Since this firmware has not been modified for several years, it has now been removed from the Velos release. This concerns the firmware of the following V-Packs:

• VP1001

• VP1004

• VP1007

• VP3001

• VP3007

• VP3008

System requirements

Velos version

• An installation needs to run on version 2024.1.SR4 or newer to be able to update to this version. Make sure to update to version 2024.1.SR4 first before installing this version.

Taurus

• When using Taurus for a DelPro integration this Velos version is only compatible with Taurus 2024.1.1 (5.147.25.0)

• For all other integrations this Velos version is compatible with Taurus 2020.1 (5.101.7.0) up to and including Taurus 2024.1.1 (5.147.25.0)

• This Velos version is compatible with Taurus 6.0 (6.0.0.62) for all integrations. Taurus with build numbers 5.x.x.x are deprecated and therefore it is advised to use Taurus 6.1

Supported browsers:

• Google Chrome

• Microsoft Edge

• Apple Safari

• Mozilla Firefox