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Tag Archive for: CANopen
Current CANopen design files do not support EECs (emergency error codes) with their human readable descriptions. This feature has become more problematic because of abstraction to parameters and signals. The system structure has become automated and proven way of working. Manual EEC management is decreasing the development efficiency because it is time-consuming and prone to inconsistent codes. These design projects are iterative and effort is wasted on each cycle of each project by managing EECs manually. Descriptions shall be uniformly defined for both producers and consumers. Read more
Various kind of inconsistencies have been typical problems in design of distributed control systems. The first solved issue was an automated generation of signal and parameter abstraction from CANopen project avoiding the inconsistent names between application software and communication. The use of meta information of signals and local parameters, such as name, minimum, maximum and default values has already been implemented to avoid the most common inconsistencies. Read more
Commonality between hydraulic valves driven by general purpose CANopen I/O and hydraulic CANopen drives
Hydraulic valves have been driven by separate valve control electronics for decades. The tradition is becoming obsolete due to ever increasing performance, controllability, maintainability and re-usability requirements of the target systems. However, there are still a lot of functionally constrained fully hydraulic systems which need to be upgraded first to electrically controlled. There are also huge number of simple proprietary control systems needing upgrade from proprietary to standard technologies and components. Especially for such kind of systems, it is important to achieve easy and straightforward upgrade path from use of proprietary valve amplifiers into coil-mounted drivers with current-controlled valve. Further step is replacing separate valves and drivers with intelligent hydraulic drives. It is also important to utilize commonality between lower- and higher performance drive solutions. This presentation shows hands-on case examples how the presented system integration challenges can be solved with standard CANopen devices according to device profiles for general-purpose I/O-devices (CiA-401) and hydraulic drives (CiA-408). The main conclusion is that commitment to CANopen actually enables not only the required approaches, but also manufacturer and device independence with large number of interchangeable devices. Another significant result is that the lowest level applications can be implemented just by integrating standardized devices, without application software project. Read more