Bridge between two worlds
Both Sercos and Ethercat have established oneself as high-performance Ethernet-based communication standards and are used in a variety of different applications.
The two busses are also encountered more and more often as internal communication platform for intelligent sub-systems like robots and assembly or transport systems. With the Sercos/Ethercat-Bridge from Cannon Automata it is now possible to connect Sercos and Ethercat masters and to transmit data bidirectional in real-time within heterogeneous real-time Ethernet communication structures. Multi-master applications are now easy to handle, the constraint to a homogeneous bus structure is eliminated.
The Sercos/Ethercat-Bridge is represented on both busses as IO device. The width of the real-time data is flexibly configurable in the range of 32 to 2048 bytes and can be adapted to the needs of various applications. Copying the data between the two busses is supported by hardware and is executed within one communication cycle. In addition to the application-specific IO data information about communication status and diagnostic data of the Sercos or Ethercat bus is transferred to the respective other side. This allows a fast reaction of the two masters on changes of the communication state or on error events.
Beside the real-time data channel the device also supports a bidirectional channel for asynchronous data transmission. On the Sercos side this mailbox mechanism is represented by IDNs which are readable and writeable over the service channel. From the Ethercat side the mailboxes are accessible over CoE objects or VoE protocol.
The device is carried out as compact module for DIN-rail mounting. For both Sercos and Ethercat two RJ45 ports are available. A further RJ45 connector at the front side serves as standard Ethernet port. Over this interface devices can communicate with other devices connected to the real-time busses using the respective mechanisms (UCC channel and EoE protocol). The IEEE 1588 master also available on this interface can be used for clock synchronization.