At the SPS IPC Drives 2012 trade show some manufacturers shown their solutions for interfacing of available products with the CAN network. Thus, such interface boards enable the devices to communicate using CANopen, DeviceNet or proprietary CAN-based higher-layer protocols. Here is a short overview of presented interface board products.
Asem (Italy) offered the Netcore X communication cards in PCI/APCI and MiniPCI/MiniAPCI formats for CANopen and CAN layer-2. These may serve as a link between the PC and the I/O devices on the machine and allow control and visualization applications to obtain the information from the field. The devices provide a DLL library for developing applications (using C, C++ or .Net) on 32-bit Windows (XP, Vista, Seven), or Windows CE systems. Using the CANopen protocol, the integration with Codesys is automatic and does not require the writing of a code to implement the communication stack.
Kimo Industrie-Elektronik (Germany) provided the FB1 CANopen field bus interface for company’s Transomik U1 (1,5 kW to 30 kW) and U2 (4 kW to 200 kW) frequency inverters. On demand, the CiA 402 CANopen drive profile may be supported. The standardized CANopen bit-rates and PDO transmission types (e.g. synchronous, change-of-state, event-based or remotely-requested) are supported.
The device includes four/four analog I/Os, two digital outputs and eight digital status reports. Usage of the Anybus communication module by HMS enables device’s application also with DeviceNet and other networks. Alternative interface version for the Lektromik S2 and SD2 soft starters is currently on development.
Maccon (Germany) launched the CAN-connectible Macinverter embedded controller board for motion control and inverter systems powered with up to 1 MW. The device dimensioning 68,5-mm x 68,5 mm x 12 mm is compatible with DC (also brushless) and AC electronic motors. Several motors and power bridge circuits may be controlled via one board. Torque, velocity and position field-oriented control are possible.
The available feedback interfaces include incremental or absolute encoders, resolver as well as Hall sensors. Further, digital and analog I/Os, Ethernet, EIA-232 and EIA 422 interfaces are available. The company founded 1982 in Munich celebrates this year its 30th unniversary.
Xilinx (UK) announced that for the Zynq-7000 EPP extensible processing platform with two CAN interfaces a CANopen NMT slave function is on development by company’s partner ETR. 11-bit and 29-bit CAN-IDs are supported. USB, Gigabit Ethernet, UART, SPI, I2S, SDIOs and GPIOs are offered as well. The SoC (system on chip) bases on the ARM Cortex-A9 processor and offers the Xilinx 7 28-nm programmable logic. The EPP is a product family enabling solutions with scalable features and a defined software tool. For example, the device is used in broadcast cameras, industrial motion control and camera-based driver assistance applications.
[info] www.can-cia.org [/info]
