SOLVED
Hello Massimo,
I'm sorry for the delayed answer.
There are two ways of safe cross communication, as shown during the recent presentations:
- SMMC (Safe Master to Master Communication)
- It is based on Standard-Ethernet or EtherCAT Automation Protocol (connecting ctrlX SAFETY SAFEX-C controllers in different EtherCAT networks). In the variant based on Standard-Ethernet it needs no extra fieldbus. It is just UDP (TCP/IP) based.
- It connects up to 4 controllers
- Each controller can provide up to 2 byte (16 bit) of safe date
- It is exchanged at the processing cycle of the safe PLC (4 ms with ctrlX SAFETY SAFEX-C)
- FSoE (Safety over EtherCAT)
- It is used to connect FSoE-Master with FSoE-Slaves. The later can be any kind of FSoE-Drives, -I/Os or other ctrlX SAFETY SAFEX-C controllers. It needs a running and correctly configured EtherCAT-Network.
- An FSoE-Master supports connections to up to 32 FSoE-Slaves.
- Each connection includes 12 safe input and 12 safe output bytes.
- The data exchange is done at the cycle time of the EtherCAT network, but you have to consider
- The basic cycle is the one of the safe PLC (see above)
- Every FSoE-connection is going through the Standard EtherCAT-Master that needs to copy the incoming data in EtherCAT data frames to the very same for outgoing data. This is valid in principal for all connections from the FSoE-Master to the FSoE-Slave and vice-versa.
- In the standard case the PLC at the EtherCAT-Master is copying the incoming to the outgoing data frames (e.g. with ctrlX CORE). With higher integration this can be shifted into the EtherCAT-Master stack. This has no impact on the timing, since the ctrlX CORE PLC can use a fieldbus synchronous task for that action. This provides only 1 EtherCAT cycle delay for the outgoing data in the best case. Shifting it the the EtherCAT-Master stack is only an improvement in usability.
Hope this helps. If you like this and it is a valid answer to your question, please mark it as a solution.
Best regards
Your ctrlX SAFETY team