Epson Fieldbus I/O
- Supports Industry Standard Fieldbus I/O Systems
- Support for DeviceNet, EtherNet/IP, EtherCAT, Profibus, ProfiNet, and CC-Link
- Master or Slave Devices Available (see details below)
- Fully Integrated into Epson RC+ Development Environment
Fieldbus I/O is used in factories worldwide to reduce cabling costs, setup time, and promote standard device usage. However, there is not 1 accepted Fieldbus I/O standard. Instead there are quite a few different ones. The more commonly used Fieldbus I/O standards are: DeviceNet, Profibus, ProfiNet, EtherNet/IP, EtherCAT, and CC-Link.
- The Epson RC700A and RC90B, and All-in-One Controllers support all 6 of the Fieldbus I/O options including: DeviceNet, EtherNet/IP, EtherCAT, Profibus, ProfiNet, and CC-Link.
Normally companies will standardize on one Fieldbus I/O communications protocol and use devices for that protocol throughout their factories. Therefore, Epson doesn't push or promote 1 protocol over any of the others but instead supports a wide variety so we can give our customers the power of choice to select the Fieldbus I/O solution standard used in their factory.
Some of the more common reasons factories use fieldbus I/O as opposed to normal discrete I/O solutions are shown below:
- Access to signals from multiple devices and multiple data from each device using one cable
- Precise signal transmission since there is no need for A/D conversion and D/A conversion.
- Less wiring costs, including signal relay board costs and installation area due to several dozen (or a hundred) devices connected on one fieldbus
- More flexible modification and expansion of a system because multiple devices are simply added to one Fieldbus without additional wiring