Epson RC180 Fieldbus I/O

Fieldbus I/O

• Supports Industry Standard Fieldbus I/O Systems
• Support for DeviceNet, EtherNet/IP, Profibus, CC-Link
• Slave Devices Available
• 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, EtherNet/IP and CC-Link. The EPSON RC180 Controller supports all 4 of these Fieldbus I/O options. 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 all 4 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