Soft PLC supports Profinet standard
A
Copa-Data product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Jan 30, 2007
Copa-Data has released a Soft PLC that supports the Profinet standard for real time communications over Ethernet hardware.
An IEC61131-3 standard Soft PLC now supports the Profinet standard for real-time communications over Ethernet hardware.
An advantage of Profinet is that it uses standard Cat5 cables and connectors, compared to the expensive connectors and termination required by Profibus.
Using the Straton Soft PLC from Copa-Data, control engineers can reduce system costs further by replacing dedicated fieldbus hardware with a "soft" Profinet server, without any loss of performance.
Following the dramatic announcement of the German association of automotive manufacturers (AIDA) that Profinet would be its new standard for manufacturing, Copa-Data was called upon by for its numerous automotive customers to support Profinet.
For example, BMW which use the company's zenOn Scada/HMI software exclusively for all areas of plant worldwide, now requires a gateway to collect data from its plant.
The soft PLC can of course be programmed to control in its own right, however there are other advantages of soft logic.
Straton is integrated off-the-shelf into zenOn Scada software, providing a ready-made solution to serve project data to the Scada system.
This Profinet gateway functionality is provided in the forthcoming release of zenOn 6.21, for all Windows and Windows CE platforms.
Profinet IO RT communication was first demonstrated in operation at the SPS/IPC/Drives fair in Nuremberg at the end of last year.
A 200m-long Ethernet link was set up between a Copa-Data hosted the Straton soft PLC acting as a Profinet controller (master) and a Wago hosted Profinet I/O device (slave).
The Straton runtime controlled the Wago I/O modules successfully, resulting in a display of blinking digital outputs controlled by the remote Straton PLC.
Profinet IO RT is the factory automation component of Profinet that provides classic fieldbus level operation and replaces Profibus.
In the new terminology, the new driver operates as a Profinet IO controller (master).
Using a powerful tool within Straton, the user can browse the Profinet network and parameterise the devices using generic station description markup language files.
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