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Curt, did you have a look at CAN? It is widely used in many automation applications, devices are cheap and reliable. As an open protocol I would recommend CANopen, maintained by CiA ( "www.can-cia.de":http://www.can-cia.de ). The standard is open (charges for copies apply, but they are not high). Special benefit for I/O devices is the availability of CAN on many microcontrollers. And CAN is a multi-master system, so it is also well suited for distributed automation approaches.
If you are interested please have a look at our
web site "www.ems-wuensche.com":http://www.ems-wuensche.com . Of special interest within the LinuxPLC approach might be devices like our Ethernet/CAN gateway running embedded Linux on an ARM7 processor (sorry for the shameless plug).
Best regards,
Thomas Wuensche
If you are interested please have a look at our
web site "www.ems-wuensche.com":http://www.ems-wuensche.com . Of special interest within the LinuxPLC approach might be devices like our Ethernet/CAN gateway running embedded Linux on an ARM7 processor (sorry for the shameless plug).
Best regards,
Thomas Wuensche