Just looking for opinions and some guidance. Is there a good method for choosing profibus slave stations. There are so many configurations out there, its hard to decide what is the best. I could choose from modular stations or stations with integrated I/O, etc..

I was just hoping for some thoughts on this subject.

Thanks,
Joe

 

One thing to watch for is how a modular station behaves on the network, i.e. those you stack together to make it a single I/O block.

Most suppliers make it such that all I/O modules stacked together behave as one slave on the network (to be set via the bus interface module
which is usually available at the left). There is also a vendor (thought it is Beckhoff, am not 100% sure) which gives every I/O module its
*own* slave-address. So if you stack 10 I/O modules, it costs you 10. Apart from performance, it makes that the address space of Profibus is quickly exhausted. You might be fooled by the
single connector, but the Profibus runs on the internal backplane as well. Has advantages, and disadvantages....

Greetings,
Rob Hulsebos