cRIO-PN-S alternative

[Michele-Icing]

Dear Community,

Easy kudos available here.

I would be interested in communicating via Profinet protocol using a cRIO 9068. The solution would be to use the cRIO-PN-S card, but this seems not to be available any longer. 

Please can you point me out to an alternative? I cannot find a suitable alternative from the official NI website (I think there is a PXI card, but nothing for the cRIO systems).

Thanks

[AndyClegg · Accepted solution]

This somewhat depends on the physical connection you need. If it is an ethernet connection, then there is option to connect the cRIO to the device(s) via the built in ethernet port, and then use the API for Profibus in Labview (not sure if it is only in a specific version of LV, or is an add-on). We've had a few systems developed interfacing to Profibus devices through the built in ethernet port. If the physical connection is via some older serial type physical connection, then you may need to dig a big deeper to find out how to a) physically interface, b) access via sw.

From our experience with Profibus, it is important to know about the terminology and configuration of the devices you are trying to talk to. This might be a useful starting point: https://www.ni.com/en-gb/innovations/white-papers/08/profibus-overview.html

[joerg.hampel]

As far as I know, all Profinet hardware products - PXI and c Series - sold by NI have been discontinued as KUNBUS (formerly know as Comsoft) are no longer producing them.

Seeing as Profinet and Profibus are two very different things - one is a field bus using RS-485, the other is an industrial protocol using ethernet - I'd be very surprised if you could directly connect Profibus devices to an ethernet port without any adapters, or if you could use a Profibus API in LabVIEW to communicate with Profinet devices. I'm not an expert, though, so I might be wrong here.

Siemens used to offer a Profinet driver that allowed Profinet communication via a generic ethernet board (ie without additional specialised hardware) but it has been discontinued, too. This driver was available for Linux, and we briefly looked into porting it to NI Linux RT. Eventually, though, we dropped the idea due to the end-of-life status of the driver itself.

[santo_13]

You can check with ApexWaves, they typically stock obsolete NI hardware - https://www.apexwaves.com/

[WALIDHM]

I would be interested in communicating via the Profinet protocol using a cRIO 9057 with extension. The idea of using a built-in Ethernet port and then an API for Profibus in Labview is not clear to me. Is it possible to give me more details please?

[joerg.hampel]

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@WALIDHM wrote:

I would be interested in communicating via the Profinet protocol using a cRIO 9057 with extension. The idea of using a built-in Ethernet port and then an API for Profibus in Labview is not clear to me. Is it possible to give me more details please?

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I do not think that there's a way to connect Profibus and Profinet without additional hardware. Not only with NI and LabVIEW, but in general. Also, I do not know of any "API for Profibus in LabVIEW", either. 

The idea I described above was to implement a LabVIEW wrapper for Siemens' Profitnet driver (which is a pure software-based implementation of the Profinet protocol) and then use the built-in ethernet socket on an NI Linux RT based device for Profinet communication.

Seeing as this driver is discontinued by Siemens, we are not pursuing this idea anymore.