Customer Success Story: Gateway Solution
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
“With the Hilscher products, we put ourself in a position to fulfill the technical requirements of the customer and to offer individual solutions for the automation market.”
- Ali U?ur Çelik, Managing Director, Z Telemetri Ltd Sti, Turkey
Presently, different automation components are used in plants. This requires – e. g., in the energy sector – a network between the SCADA control systems, fire alarm systems and building automation. However, since these systems do not always speak the same protocol, a protocol converter called gateway is necessary. The gateways developed by Hilscher allow connecting similar and different protocols of the automation world such as CANopen, DeviceNet, PROFIBUS, PROFINET, EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP, Modbus RTU, POWERLINK, and Sercos. Simple handling and the cost advantage due to the support of serial buses, classic fieldbus systems and Real-Time Ethernet systems speak for themselves. Thus, for many industrial project requests, the gateways offer a solution.
Z Telemetri uses the Hilscher gateways in many project requests. Following is an example of the field of application for the gateway with the fieldbus protocol PROFIBUS in a mining project.
Located in K?rka Town of the county of Seyitgazi/Eskisehir, K?rka Boron Works was established in 1970. The enterprise which started to operate through the organisation of the construction site in 1970 acquired the “plant” status with the groundbreaking of the concentrator and started to operate in “enterprise status” in 1975 with the commissioning of the concentrator. Due to the requirements and demands of the market, new systems must be integrated.
After a closer look at the plant, the Hilscher gateway netTAP 50-DP-RS was deemed the right solution for the customer. Thereby, the determined protocol conversion from the existing ASCII to Profibus DP is realised. For the configuration, the free configuration tool Sycon.net is provided.
The processes of the ASCII side are detected and processed by the Hilscher gateway netTAP 50-DP-RS. Next, the assignment of the I/O data via the configuration tool Sycon.net is required. You have to be aware that at least 1 Byte output as well as the same number of input data has to be provided for the PROFIBUS integration.
For the ASCII protocol, 1-3 address areas are predefined which can be adjusted via the Sycon.net. On the PROFIBUS side, the first 16 bytes input and 1 byte output of the netTAP 50-DP-RS are used. The allocation of the ASCII protocol (3 bytes input) is made after the PROFIBUS addressing from the 17th byte. The parameterisation and the configuration of the PROFIBUS network have been successfully tested in a test setup using a fire alarm system.
“In no time we were able to convert an ASCII protocol which did not conform to the standard into the PROFIBUS network. This project shows that the requirements of the customer were completely fulfilled by the performance and the stability of the Hilscher Gateway,” concludes Ali U?ur Çelik.
Image Caption: netTAP 50 is a protocol converter for simple conversions. It supports conversions from and to one port Real-Time Ethernet, fieldbus and serial automation protocols. The conversion can be either slave to slave or slave to master. As a master, netTAP 50 provides full master functionality to one slave device only.