Industrielle Automatisierungssysteme GmbH

EC32 - Supported Hardware Interfaces

This page shows information regarding the supported hardware interfaces. Special hardware handling is available on request.

- Serial communication

Handling serial communication depends very much on the hardware being used in the system. Normally each serial port requires a port address and an associated interrupt. A standard AT type Intel based computer only has 16 interrupt lines available, of which some are already used by some other components, like the hard disk, keyboard, printer etc.. These are the standard interrupt assignments:

0	Timer	8	Real Time Clock
1	Keyboard	9	Redirected IRQ2
2	Slave Interrupt Contr.	10	Free
3	COM2	11	Free
4	COM1	12	Free
5	LPT2	13	Math Coprocessor
6	Floppy	14	Fixed Disk
7	LPT1	15	Free

Due to this the possible amount of serial ports is limited depending on the overall hardware structure of the system.
In general there are no specific requirements for serial port interfaces as long as the address follows the standard port address scheme and the interrupt could be set on the interface card.
By default EC32 supports 8 serial COM ports. We strongly recommend to use interfaces with a FIFO chip, since the performance would be much better.
The first four COM ports have a standard assignment in the file EC.ECD in the project directory:

Port	Address	Interrupt	Usage
COM1	3F8	4	STANDSERIAL
COM2	2F8	3	STANDSERIAL
COM3	3E8	5	STANDSERIAL
COM4	2E8	12	STANDSERIAL

By using multiport interface cards, the number of port could be expanded. Since multiport serial I/O cards require a specific handling, it must be checked, whether they match the EC32 implementation. Supported Boards are HOSTESS and DIGIBOARD.
The type of the physical port (either RS232, RS485 or 20 mA) does not matter, since the UART is is all cases the same.
The number of serial ports could also be expanded by using COM servers via Ethernet TCP/IP from Wiesemann & Theis, Germany.
- Digital I/O
There are two ways of doing digital I/O:
- Discrete
The most common way is by using a discrete I/O interface, which is to be polled, has a adjustable I/O address and either 8 or 16 Bits for input and output. Normally the voltage level is round about 24 Volt DC and the interface should provide optical isolation.
- Interbus
If the number of bits exceeds the available bits on a discrete interface, the other solution is by using an Interbus-S adapter from Phoenix. With this technique we have up to 256 I/O points for input and output.
- Network
For Network communication EC32 provides drivers for UDP/IP and TCP/IP. There are many network interface cards availbale and each of them requires a specific handling. In the past we have concentrated on NIC from 3COM or NE200 compatible but others may already exist in our driver. Please ask, if there is any need to use a specific NIC from another vendor.
EC32 supports not only one network interface card. For special applications we have implemented the possiblity to use two NIC.

Reasons might be related to the need to communicated on two physical independent network segments:
Interface 1

or also for enhanced security to work on redundant network segments
Interface 2

- Modbus Plus
Modbus Plus is a communication network for PLC systems of Modicon (Andover, Mass., USA). The connection to these systems is done via an SA85 ModbusPlus adapter or via TCP/IP.
- Profibus
For communication with Profibus hardware we have made an implementation for a Profibus FMS Master by using an interface card from Hilscher.

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