Hilscher netX PCIe Card PLK Slave connecting to X20 PLC

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1

Hi community,

Does anyone have experience setting up a Hilsher netX PCIe Card as a PLK slave and connecting to a X20 PLC?

Would be great if anyone could share some insights.

Best,

Samuel

2

Hello Samuel,

you will find a description of how to integrate a 3rd party device here: OEM devices

Unfortunately, I haven’t used a Hilscher slave card yet.

Regards

Stephan

3

What is the operating system for this application. Maybe there are alternatives to a Powerlink card.

Stephan

4

The PC is running Windows. It is running some proprietary vision software and wish to push some data to X20 PLC. They were using OPCUA, but OPCUA was too slow for their application and are exploring Powerlink instead.

5

I wouldn’t expect Powerlink to be ‘faster’ since the actual implementation still uses 100Mbit.

In comparison, we have long been at 1 Gbit and above with standard Ethernet.

Then the question is whether this proprietary software can place the data volume in the real-time channel of Powerlink.

If, on the other hand, it can only provide UDP/TCP data in the asynchronous payload the result will be slower than before.

Are we talking about real-time performance issues or throughput problems?

Could UDP datagrams also be a solution?

6

I agree with Christoph, also keep in mind that Powerlink in Windows will not be real-time and therefore have no advantage over UDP. If you could provide some details, we can give you more guidance.

  • What amount of data are you transmitting?
  • What is the expected speed for transferring this data?
  • What communications options does the vision system provide? Can they program freely or are they limited to certain protocolls?
7

Hi everyone,

Sorry I was wrong on the Windows PC. The windows PC was only used to configure the Hilscher Card over network because the Hilscher software doesn’t support Linux…

The Vision PC is running on Linux. They wrote the vision system and can freely program any ethernet based solution if necessary. The reason why they are exploring industrial fieldbuses is to save time writing their own.

The data they are sending is around 650Bytes in each direction but technically not all of those bytes had to be sent at the same time.

Currently they are not sure on where the limitation with the OPCUA solution is just that they knew OPCUA is quite slow historically and is exploring PLK for a faster alternative.

8

If they find a proper OPC UA FX driver, they could even achieve real-time capabilities as long as the sender is capable of real-time, too. However, even with OPC UA PUB/SUB you should be able to get close to 10ms without stretching too much. I have done tests with UDP and you can get near to 1ms if the PLC task runs in 400us and there is no disturbance on the network. Both are technically not real-time but keep in mind that even real-time is not failsafe and speed does not equal real-time. You can lose frames on a real-time network, too. A CAN bus with 100k Baud rate counts as real-time even if it takes 100ms to receive the data.

My recommendation would be, if you want to stay within in a standard and 10ms is fast enough, use OPC UA PUB/SUB. If you want to get as fast as possible, use UDP.

Stephan