AnaGate PROFINET CAN

The AnaGate PROFINET CAN of Analytica GmbH is a freely configurable CAN to PROFINET gateway, which can interconnect two independent different bus topologies.

CAN PROFINET gateway

The AnaGate PROFINET CAN acts as link between a CAN bus network and a PROFINET IO controller. It can be used to access an existing CAN-based controlling system by ethernet-based PROFINET IO, which is a widely accepted industrial communication standard.

To make this possible, arbitrary CAN telegrams have to converted to the IO based PROFINET protocol. In order to assure the greatest flexibility when adapting, the CAN telegrams are copied by the gateway to a fix structure in the process image of the programming logic controller (PLC).

Fundamental interface functionality

The AnaGate PROFINET CAN supports up to 8 slots to receive and 8 slots to send CAN messages. A slot is a group of PROFINET IOs, which contains the data of a single CAN telegram in the present case.

Incoming CAN telegrams can be filtered by an input mask, only a telegram with matching CAN ID is to be copied to the corresponding receive slot. For each outgoing CAN telegram the CAN id have to be specified in the sending slot.

Futher possibilities

The present implementation of converting IO structure to CAN messages and vice versa is simple and effective, but there are limitations. Not every existing CAN based proprietary protocol can be perfectly adapted. This is, in particular, the case if too many different CAN IDs are used or even if the messages throughput is too high for the cycle time of the PLC.

In these cases, it can be considered to create a perfectly adapted firmware for the AnaGate PROFINET base hardware platform, which is especially designated for individual requirements. Naturally Analytica supports their customers with economic individual hardware and software solutions.