Your practical IEC 61850 Process Bus traffic generator — free, open-source, real Ethernet output
Use ARStack Studio and one affordable ESP32-P4 Ethernet board to generate actual IEC 61850 Sampled Values and PTP traffic for process-bus and digital-substation lab simulation. Give a relay, BCU or analyzer a configurable SV stream to subscribe to, inspect its behavior and troubleshoot engineering configurations without needing a full physical Merging Unit test rack.
Download the latest stable release · Getting started · Product website · Get help
| Explore | With ARStack |
|---|---|
| Inject real Process Bus traffic | Publish 4 current + 4 voltage channels over Ethernet at nominal 4,000 SV frames/s; use this traffic as lab input for relay/BCU/analyzer experiments. |
| Simulate SV + PTP together | Generate IEC 61850 SV frames alongside PTP Announce/Sync/Follow_Up with an internal laboratory PTP SOURCE; inspect smpSynch and signal timing. |
| Control waveforms | Set 4I+4V current, voltage and phase values; the powered board keeps publishing if Studio closes and Studio re-adopts its state when reopened. |
| Inspect and troubleshoot | Use Studio or Wireshark to inspect SV/PTP; compare APPID, svID, multicast MAC and VLAN with the subscriber configuration. Other analyzers can be tried with matching filters. |
| Try engineering-file profiles | Import supported SCL/SCD/CID/IID SV engineering configurations; inspect stream identity and deploy supported single-stream 4I+4V profiles. |
M3.H.3 official stable lab release: 4,705,090 SV frames captured across 19 min 36 s at 3,999.886 fps, with zero missing, duplicate, reordered or malformed SV frames. SV and PTP were on the wire, and all received SV carried smpSynch=2 in the internal lab timing profile. Close Studio and the powered ESP32-P4 keeps publishing; reopen it and Studio adopts the live board state. Capture details.
Roadmap: Multi-SV + SCL-driven MU simulation. The next engineering phase is to publish multiple independently identifiable SV streams concurrently from a single ESP32-P4, then let engineers open an SCL/SCD/CID file, choose SV streams and deploy their supported DataSet/communication profiles. One small board, multiple process-bus sources, real Ethernet packets. These are upcoming features, not included in the M3.H.3 single-stream release. Implementation roadmap.
Screenshot captured directly from the Windows Qt application by the native GUI test.
- Download ARStack Studio for Windows x64 (Setup EXE or Portable ZIP).
- Open Studio and try the built-in 4I+4V Quick Start profile. You can explore the interface before connecting hardware.
- To transmit real Ethernet frames, connect a compatible ESP32-P4 Ethernet board over USB and Ethernet. Use Configuration → Firmware to install the firmware bundled with the same release.
- Choose PTP SOURCE / INTERNAL_GM_ONLY, set SMPSYNCH AUTO, configure voltage/current waveforms, and press Start. Studio can be closed while the board stays powered and Ethernet remains connected.
- View the output using Studio capture or Wireshark (
0x88BAfor SV,0x88F7for PTP).
Full first-run guide → · Installation on Windows and Linux
For active SV/PTP transmission, use an isolated laboratory Ethernet network, not an operating substation process bus.
| Package | Availability |
|---|---|
| Windows Setup EXE | Available in M3.H.3 official stable |
| Windows Portable ZIP | Available in M3.H.3 official stable |
| Matched ESP32-P4 firmware | Available with the same release |
| Linux AppImage | Available in M3.H.3 official stable |
Every published Windows release includes the application dependencies and a matched firmware package; no C++ build environment is required for ordinary installation.
ARStack is built to make IEC 61850 experiments more accessible to engineers, students and automation enthusiasts around the world.
- Ask a question or report a problem — share what you tried and what happened.
- Share your lab result — relay/BCU screenshots, stream configuration and Wireshark results are welcome; hardware purchase or formal test reports are not required.
- SCL import help — a practical path when imported SV fields do not appear.
- Contribute — improvements to documentation, software, tests and examples are welcome.
ARStack uses the GPL-3.0 license. Run it on an isolated bench/test network, not an energized/live substation process bus. It generates simulated traffic, not calibrated primary measurement data.
Want to explore the protocol engine or build from source? Start with the developer documentation index.
The source tree includes a portable C++20 IEC 61850 protocol engine, SCL/COMTRADE tooling, MMS and GOOSE foundations, ESP32-P4 firmware and reproducible tests. Capabilities vary by application and release; the feature matrix separates released tools from libraries and development features.