DACHS^®  PROFIBUS

PROFIBUS was the first international open and vendor independent fieldbus standard which could be used in building, material flow, process and manufacturing automation, etc.

Our DACHS^®  PROFIBUS application interface to the IO data is based on shared memory which provides the fastest data transfer between the application and the driver. This allows very short update cycles without overloading the CPU by unnecessary conversion or preprocessing at driver level.

The communication of the application with the driver for management, configuration, and diagnose functions is based on message passing (devctrls). 

All PROFIBUS services of the part 1-3 of the European Standard EN 50170 are completely supported in DACHS^®  PROFIBUS software.  The cycle time of the drivers are adjustable in the range from 1ms to 4ms. It is also possible to trigger the bus cycle by the applicaton.

We offer packages with soft- and hardware for the following PROFIBUS protocols:

PROFIBUS DP,   PROFIBUS FDL,  PROFIBUS FMS   all @ 12Mb/s
  

DACHS^®- PROFIBUS Run-Time Packages

DACHS^®- PROFIBUS Development Packages

Supported PROFIBUS-DP Boards @ 12 Mb/s

• PROFIboard PCI  (Softing)
• PROFI104 (Softing)
• PROFIboard ISA (Softing)
• CP5613 (Siemens)
• PMC251 (Kontron)
• CP351 (Kontron

PROFIboard ISA	PROFI104	PROFIboard PCI

 

These coprocessor boards (PROFIboard or PROFI104 from Softing) allow to connect a PC to a PROFIBUS-DP or PROFIBUS-FDL/FMS network. The protocol software is processed by the onboard protocol ASIC ASPC2 and SPC3.  With a transmission speed of 12Mb/s, the ASPC2 master ASIC provides access to the PROFIBUS-DP slaves. The ASIC SPC3 allows the board to act as a DP slave. A second on-board processor handles the communication with the host system and the DP ASIC and also the processing of the layer 7 services e.g.

DP-Master Configurators
- Platform independent configurator for QNX6, Linux and MS Windows

This configurator supports a comfortable configuration based on GSD files.

- Configurator (CMD) with management and diagnostic functions under Photon

The configuration, management and diagnostic of the PROFIBUS-DP master and the related slaves are handled by the DACHS-CMD, a PHOTON application. The graphical user interface is implemented with PHOTON, the realtime-capable GUI from QNX. You retain the complete graphical surface even when handling via modem.

PROFIBUS DP at 12Mb/s for RTAI Linux and Standard Linux

For PROFIboard ISA and PCI as well as for PROFI104 (PC/104) from Softing are released DP Master drivers and C-APIs for standard Linux and for RTAI Linux.

Both drivers are mapping the IO data of the slaves into the memory of the Linux system (similar to 'reflective memory').
The modification of the Slave IO data can be done very fast by pointers to the input and output areas which are mapped into memory of the Linux system.

The cycle time of the standard driver is in the range of 1 to 2 milliseconds, but of course, it has a remarkable jitter.

The RTAI Linux based driver and its user task are working under hard real-time conditions and allow a predictable cycle time of two millisecond. For the import of GSD files and configuration of the DP-Masters is offered our platform independent Configurator which runs under QNX6, Linux or MS-Win.

Two short application examples

Soft PLCs

Visual programming of hard real-time applications

Hard real-time IEC 61131-3 QNX targets --more

• for ISaGRAF®  3.4
  
  IEC 61131-3 tools for programming in all standard IEC 61131-3 languages:
  ladder logic, function block display, sequencial function charts, instruction list and structured text.
  C function blocks can be added to the IEC 61131-3 runtime systems to provide QNX OS services or the support of special hardware interfaces.