The Windows real-time environment »RealTime Suite« of the Berlin company Kithara Software now supports time-critical applications with Profibus, too. Therewith this proved and widely-used fieldbus system can be used in future with Windows in real time.
Despite of the undeniable trend to Ethernet-based automation protocols, Profibus is currently the system with the most widely-use and furthermore high growth. However, with Windows it was only useable out of closed systems or without real-time characteristics. The »RealTime Suite« of Kithara is a function library and offers a flexible approach for the user. Powerful real-time solutions can be implemented with Profibus (DP) in a similar comfortable manner like the successfully used Kithara EtherCAT Master.
In order to gain a flexible and efficient solution, Kithara Software is co-operating intensively with the company Hilscher Systemautomation and supports the Profibus extension card CIFX 50-DP by Hilscher. The result was a real-time capable Profibus DP V1 Class 1 Master, which can be a part of a multi-master topology and supports up to 125 slaves.
Because of the graphical definition of the Profibus system, the developer can comfortably configure the Profibus Master. An easy parameterization of the Master, Slaves and Profibus parameters saves time and provides for a user-friendly creation of needed configuration files for the real-time mode.
The coding is performed as usual at Kithara with the familar programming languages and development environments, which includes C/C++ and Delphi. Using a DLL, C# is also supported.
Kithara Software provides further information on the Hannover Fair in hall 11, booth A62.
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