Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"John Quintana" <[email protected]> · Thu, 25 Sep 2003 08:17:25 -0500

I suppose I should weigh in on this.  The Ethernet version of the Koyo
PLC's uses a variant of the DirectNet Protocol over the network. I did
some work on porting the SDK used by Host Engineering over to Linux from
a Windows environment.  This was Relatively straight forward and only
involved changing some socket code.  It does work and there are
beamlines using this
As part of their own custom code.
I'm not sure what the state of the documentation for this is now since I
Haven't worked on it in years.   I do remember that there was an
endianness issue in the code that kept it from working on big endian
machines without major tweaking.  I still
Have the code base and if someone wants to work on it, I'll get ahold of
Host to see if its ok to share it.  Let me know.

Cheers,

John

John Quintana                                  630-252-0221  (ph.)
Northwestern University                   630-252-0226  (fax)
Building 432/A001                           [email protected]
9700 S. Cass Ave
Argonne IL 60439

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Johnson [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 9:31 AM
To: Tao Zhao
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: EPICS with Automation Direct PLC

Tao Zhao wrote:
> 
> I need to connect EPICS to Automation Direct PLC through Ethernet Base
> Controller. Have anyone done that? Would anyone recommand some online
> documentation for EPICS Device Support or Driver Support to read?

We are interested in being able to do this here at APS; we already 
communicate with Automation Direct PLCs using their DirectNet serial 
protocol, the software I wrote to do this is described at
    http://www.aps.anl.gov/asd/people/anj/directNet/
and the code can be found at
    http://www.aps.anl.gov/asd/people/anj/tar/directNetMpf1-0.tar.gz
It may be possible to re-use some of this software with an ethernet 
connection to the PLC, in particular look at the device support routines

and the PLC status database.  If you can't reuse the code I would hope 
that at least the hardware address format I devised could be used, as 
commonality at this level will make it easy to move databases between
the 
two device types.  See the above documentation for details of the
format, 
it's simple and relies on named PLCs being configured in the IOC startup

script.

Note that the above driver uses Marty Kraimer's MPF and mpfSerial for
the 
serial port handling.

I am willing to help with questions and more, but after today I'll be
away 
on honeymoon for the next 2.5 weeks (yay!).

- Andrew
-- 
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System