Brisk Interest in the 8th Plug Festival

The 8th annual plug fest for sercos III implementations took place on October 29th at the Institute for Control Engineering of Machine Tools and Manufacturing Units (ISW) at the University of Stuttgart. Numerous companies took the opportunity to test their latest sercos developments and prototypes for interoperability with devices from other manufacturers. A well-balanced mix of master and slave devices made it possible to test a number of different scenarios. Participants not only thoroughly tested various interactions between netX and FPGA-based hardware platforms, but also the compatibility of various communication functions (hotplugging,ring redundancy) and different function profiles (FSP Drive and FSP IO). Many slave manufacturers also took the opportunity to run a test with the manufacturer-independent reference system – the sercos Slave Conformizer – in order to prepare for upcoming certification of their devices. The 9th plug fest is planned for May 23/24, 2012.