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Integrated safe drives   ■ Ralf Moebus

Today’s predominantly used safety solutions for automated machinery are designed to keep the operator away from the dangerous movements of machine parts. These are often realized by safety fences and safety gates. Safety switches are monitoring that the safety gates are closed during the running manufacturing process. In areas where material has to be feed frequently to the process, optical protection devices are often used ...

Distributed processing at speed: SafetyNET p Ethernet fieldbus  ■ Frank Ogden

Compared with today's fieldbus systems, Ethernet in its current form is just too complex. This affects scan times, precision/frequency of measurements, data flow and processor power, among other things. As far as the automation system is concerned, the performance of the process computer as well as the communication must satisfy growing requirements. As a modern Ethernet-based fieldbus system, SafetyNET p matches these needs with ease ...

CANopen application layer for Safetynet p ■ Ralf Moebus

In order to provide a common application layer SafetyNET p uses CANopen. The CANopen standard describes the exchange of data in a CAN-based network. Since it is not limited to CAN it can be used for SafetyNET p. CANopen is standardized in the European standard EN 50325-4 and is looked after by the CiA (CAN in Automation) ...