The Anybus Communicator and X-gateway series of gateways have more than 300 individual gateways that support up to 17 industrial protocols, including a wide range of common field buses and industrial Ethernet for connecting machines, control systems or communication networks in the industrial field. With the flexibility to match master/slave relationships between machines and PLC control systems, the wide range of products allows for perfect interconnections between equipment and systems on the factory floor.
The following describes the mapping instructions for Anybus gateway data exchange:
- Both network interfaces exchange data over the network through two buffers. As shown in the following figure, the gateway forwards data between the buffers.
- Each buffer can hold up to 512 bytes of data, which is the theoretical maximum number of bytes that can be exchanged in each direction. However, the actual number of bytes exchanged is highly dependent on the selected network interface.
- In addition to network I/O, these buffers can optionally be used to provide access to network status messages, and to control various aspects of the gateway. This may be general diagnostic information (called ’status words“), a list of active slaves (”Live List"), or other network-specific status information.
- A specialized control word can be used to start/stop data exchange or reset the gateway as needed. Most networks distinguish between fast cyclic I/O and non-cyclic data where time is not critical. Where applicable, this is also reflected in how data is handled by the gateway and the onboard network interface.
Standard Slave-Slave Gateway Configuration
The following diagram illustrates how data is mapped in a standard Slave-Slave gateway configuration. Note the control and status words, in this case both networks are enabled.
Standard Master-Slave Gateway Configuration
The following diagram illustrates how the data is mapped in a standard Master-Slave gateway configuration. The mapping is similar to the Slave-Slave configuration described above, but with the additional feature of a “Live List”, which shows the active status of the slaves that have been added to the master interface on the board.
