I have been investigating this commnications link for while and wondered if anyone has done anything like it before. I have seen i application where the same robot controller communicating to same premium PLC but am still trying to track down some info.

The PLC has a serial port (Modbus ASCII/RTU) and ethernet (ModbusTCP. The Robot Controlller has an ethernet port, RS232 port and RS422 full duplex port.

So far i figure that i have a few options:
1. ModbusTCP to serial gateway for the robot serial port access to Ethernet network
2. ModbusTCP to TCP/IP gateway
3. Serial to serial comms with code to strip info out of ASCII string.

Hopefully someone out there has done this and can assist me with some details.

Thanks in advance,
Rod

 

I have done something like that and your approach is going to be limited by what you can do on the robot. You are assuming it supports Modbus. And an ethernet port doesn't mean that it supports anything that you can make use of. I would spend some time with the robot docs. The ABB I've
seen used something similar to pascal as a programming language so there is hope. Whether they provide access to the comms is another matter.

Regards

cww

 

With the ABB robot, you have the multitask support and the 'RAPID' language. It means that you can eventually create a task which will receive the serial port frames, analyse it, use the result to change robot data, and then create frames to answer to the PLC.

But you can't know if the background task will be as quick as necessary to do this job. And it's definitly not the way to exchange data with a PLC. Use the network field to exchange data with the PLC, and if you want to exchange datas between robot and PC, use the ABB OPC Server.

Regards
David