Industrial Data Xchange

In a call-out to a smelter in South Africa last week, the IDX Product Technical Support Team  assisted in the configuration of an Anybus X gateway. This particular flavour of the vast Anybus range converts PROFIBUS to ControlNet. More specifically, it is a PROFIBUS master and a ControlNet adapter (slave).  In this case, the PROFIBUS slaves were analyzers used to monitor gas emissions into the atmosphere. However, the plant's main control system runs off an Allen Bradley PLC and speaks ControlNet.  The X gateway was configured to read the data from the PROFIBUS analyzers and convert these values to ControlNet. This allows the control system to monitor the plant's emissions demonstrating once again the critical role that the Anybus Product range plays in industry. So what steps were taken to ensure everything was working?  1) The PROFIBUS master side of the gateway is configured using NetTool (this process was explained in one of our earlier blogs  here ) 2) It was ensure