Velos 2023.3a Dairy Farming

2023.3

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

• Feeding on rotary parlours is now supported in combination with Per Point ID.

• Improved Per Point ID on rotary parlours. The first detection of a cow is now valid until the end of the round. The cow can not be replaced automatically for the rest of its milking session. It is still possible to replace a cow manually.

• Fixed the following issues:

  • In a rotary parlour with entrance identification, cows that were detected by the antenna for less than 250ms were not placed correctly.

  • In a rotary parlour a cow was not detected when the cow detect sensor stayed active continuously between two stalls.

  • In a rotary parlour with overhead identification, the first cow of a milking session was always placed at the previous stall.

  • In a parlour with Per Point Identification the monitor page of the PPID behaviour component did not show all antennas in some cases.

  • In very rare cases inserting a cow in a parlour with Parallel Herringbone Identification, via the parlour monitor or a control panel like an InTouch or an MPC, while the cows are still entering the parlour, could cause one stall to become empty.

  • When selecting Processed responders on the monitor page of a behaviour component of type PPID, Parallel Herringbone ID or Parlour feeder, the breadcrumb on the processed responders page always showed "vpu-1" even when the behaviour component was deployed on a secondary VPU.

Traffic

• Fixed the following issue:

  • Separation overview report did not show the correct reason for cows that were not separated for a separation rule, e.g. when a cow was separated by manual mode of a separation unit.

Feeding

• Improved the feed history report. It is now possible to select on both absolute balance and percent balance. Previously absolute balance was the only option.

  

• Fixed the following issues:

  • On the page Reports > Feed balance per group, the sort order did not work when selecting 'total' or 'balance'. 

  • In a rotary parlour with feeding, the monitor page displayed the feed bin icon on the wrong position.

Nedap CowControl

Heat Detection and Health Monitoring

Added support for subscription tags. Subscription tags are recognisable by the (S) symbol on the tag. These tags use encrypted data communication.

Subscription will become available at later stage. More information will follow.

• Fixed the following issues:

  • On the page Farm > [location], the group eating pattern chart was still visible when there was no data to display.

  • On the page Reports > Health and management, the headers Eating time, Rumination, and Inactive were not placed correctly above the columns.

  • The page Reports > Calendar dates did not show the expected dry off date and the expected calving date in case the cow had more than 1 pregnancy check.

  • On the page Settings > Calendar > General on the tab Attentions the tool tips were not placed at the correct position.

  • On the Heat Detection Attention Page, reachable from the Heat detection widget on the dashboard, the print option did not display the optimal insemination moment correctly.

  • Sorting on columns that may be empty did not work correctly.

  • On the Calendar Attention Page, reachable via any link in the the Calendar widget on the dashboard, an empty Life No was displayed as "?". Now it is displayed as empty, similar to reports.

  • Synchronisation of sire advice with Business Insight failed.

Cow Locating

• Improved performance of the Cow locating application by handling cow position events more efficient.

• Fixed the following issues:

  • In some cases VP4201 beacons were displayed as connected even when they were not connected.

  • On the page Maintenance > V-Packs > ... > Power channels, VP4201 beacons were not displayed.

Nedap MilkingControl

• Fixed the following issues:

  • A milk yield attention was created when the absolute (kg or lbs) OR the relative (%) criteria was met while, according the manual, this must be absolute AND relative. Milk yield attentions are now created when both the kg/lbs AND the % criteria are met.

  • Milk yield of first attachment was removed when adding a milk separation action for this cow via the parlour monitor after a reattachment.

  • The deviation (%) on the the attention pages that are reachable via the Milking widget on the dashboard and the report Milk attentions was not consistent due to differences in rounding in the calculation.

  • The red blinking milk place number for milk yield attention was not removed from the parlour monitor when the corresponding cow was removed from that milk place.

  • The text 'Pre-wash' was removed from a milk place when refreshing the parlour monitor page.

  • In a parlour with Parallel Herringbone Identification all cows were shifted one stall on the parlour monitor page after refreshing the page.

  • When trying to start washing on an InTouch when this is not allowed, e.g. when milking is still active on another InTouch, the LED on the InTouch sometimes started blinking continuously. Now it will blink 4 times only, as it should.

  • Milking data was not exported correctly via Taurus and the Velos .NET API. Date and time sent with the data was the start of the milking session where Taurus and the Velos .NET API expect it to be the end of the milking session. Now the time of the end of the milking session is sent.

  • Cow information was removed from the parlour monitor when pre-wash was started when cow was ready for milking. This resulted in milk yield not being registered for this cow.

  • On the pages Settings > Behaviour components and Maintenance > Behaviour components the sorting order of the InTouch behaviour components was not logical. These behaviour components are named automatically with InTouch-xx, where xx is the number of the milk place that is belongs to. On new systems leading zeros are added to xx so the sorting order becomes logical. Existing systems remain as is.

  • The Milking tab on the animal overview page under Farm displayed "Can not display information" for cows without milking data. Now it displays the option to add a milking separation. 

General

• Added a "What's new" link to the footer of each Velos page. When a new Velos version is available a badge will be shown next to the link to indicate this. Clicking the link will show the release notes for the new version as well as previous versions.

  

  Opening the "What's new" link shows the available release notes.

  

  Selecting one of the available release notes shows a pop-up window with these notes.

  

• The page "Maintenance > Software Bill of Materials" shows all 3rd party open source libraries that are used by the Velos application and the underlying Java Runtime Environment and Linux Environment.

  

• Nedap constantly updates the software to prevent security vulnerabilities. In this version some 3rd party libraries have been updated because of this. In this version also the Linux environment has been updated to a new version.

• Updated timezone information.

• Improved speed of creating a system backup.

• Improved updating of V-Packs

  • Wired devices are updated before wireless devices. If wireless devices communicate through a wired device now the wired device always has new firmware first.

  • Improved detection of V-Pack type A or or B before starting an upgrade.

• Nedap Now mode is allowed on VP8002 VPUs only.

• Fixed the following issues:

  • Creating automatic backups when in Nedap Now mode did not work anymore.

  • Dashboard widget links to 'Tags not linked' and 'SmartTags not linked' were still shown when in Nedap Now mode while the related pages were hidden. These links are not shown on the dashboard anymore in Nedap Now mode.

  • In Nedap Now mode it was possible to update a location without an actual connection with Nedap Now.

  • The vpu-online domain did not work anymore after replacing a VPU.

  • Registering a vpu-online domain in the setup wizard took minutes to complete.

  • On the page Settings > User management > Email notification the table filter and sorting options were displayed incorrect and table sorting didn't work.

  • On the page Settings > Network, changing the Velos net IP address was not possible because the submit button was disabled.

  • On the page Settings > Farm layout, the root location was not editable when in standalone mode.

  • On the page Maintenance > Vpacks > Power channels, the current was displayed multiplied by a factor 10.

  • On the page Maintenance > Update, no error was shown when uploading the update file failed.

  • Fixed an issue that caused the help website being marked by Google as a dangerous site.

Firmware

• VP1004 3.01.08

  • Fixed an issue that caused antennas of a VP1004 to be not showed on the page Maintenance > Identification.

• VP4102 3.06.30

  • Added support for ear tag messages.

  • Added support for encrypted and subscription tags.

  • Added temperature messages.

  • RSSI diagnosis page now also works for 922 MHz.

  • Fixed average RSSI calculation.

  • Added SmartFlow milkmeter calibration support.

  • Added new frequency bands for worldwide SmartFlow usage .

  • Improved repeater update.

  • Disable repeater mode when using SmartFlow.

  • Update bootloader to v1.03.02, fixes IP address going to 0.0.0.0 after update.

  • Support long UDP messages to Velos.

• VP4201 1.03.06

  • Improved tuning of the antenna.

System requirements

Velos version

• An installation needs to run on version 2021.1 or newer to be able to update to this version. Make sure to update to version 2021.1 first before installing this version.

Taurus

• This version is compatible with Taurus 2020.2 (5.101.7.0) and Taurus 2023.1 (5.143.93.0).

Mobile device versions:

• iOS 14 or later

• Android 5.0 or later

Supported browsers:

• Chrome

• Edge

2023.3a

In Velos 2023.3a contains following fixes:

• It was no longer possible to select a colour in the colour picker that was used for selecting a colour for a feed type and for selecting colours when creating maps for cow locating.

• The page Maintenance > VPU connection checker always showed that the Velos version was out of date on secondary VPUs.

• It occurred that in-memory databases were corrupted when shutting down the VPU.