Acyclic communication between LabVIEW and Profinet, Ethernet/IP, EtherCAT and other real-time Ethernet fieldbuses is not rocket science

Most customer enquiries we receive regarding LabVIEW fieldbus communication relate to cyclic communication, i.e. the clock-synchronous exchange of process data, referred to as PDO (Process Data Object) in EtherCAT or CANopen.

However, for performance reasons alone, by no means all parameters of bus devices are available for cyclic communication. In particular, parameter sets for complex bus participants, such as servo controllers, are available exclusively via acyclic data transfer (known as SDO – Service Data Object – in EtherCAT and CANopen), meaning that these are only sent or received on request.

Therefore, if parameters of controllers, output stages or sensors, or even settings for error handling, are to be changed, access to acyclic data is required. Our LabVIEW library ‘Bus Interface for Hilscher CIFX’ can also handle this. However, as acyclic data exchange can vary significantly from bus to bus and from application to application, the relevant functions are not included in the library as standard; instead, we develop them specifically for the particular application.

Do you have such an application? Then please get in touch!

CONTACT:
Holger Mueller
Email: mueller@mueller-krahmer.de
Mobile: +49 160 / 287 7294