Rexroth has added some new materials to the educational kit they offer on Advancing Factory Automation. Among the new items is information on Sercos III.
Sercos is a bus specifically designed for high quality Ethernet connectivity and communication. Sercos is commonly used in industrial automation applications which implement a protocol structure for control of motion and I/O devices. It is capable of fully consistent performance in motion control and ensures the synchronization of multiple drives, a feature that the majority of common networking busses can’t offer.
Sercos III is the latest innovation in Serco technology, and offers deterministic bi-directional real time motion and I/O control. Sercos III combines the best aspects of top quality Ethernet devices and previous Sercos designs to provide an ideal solution for Ethernet-based real-time communication. Wasted bandwidth was one of the biggest problems with previous bus devices, but thanks to Sercos III focus on Ethernet frames this is no longer a problem. Additionally, Sercos III offers an expanded selection of protocols such as EtherNet/IP, TCP/IP, UDP, and a few others.
Moreover, there are quite a few specific improvements that Sercos III has over previous designs. First and foremost, high speed performance is top priority – the bus provides 100 mb/s Ethernet with cycle times as low as 31.25 microseconds. The bus supports line and ring topologies, and features bumpless cable break recovery in ring mode within 25 usec. Sercos III also supports up to 511 slave devices per network and allows advanced cross communication. But the most impressive feature of all may very well be the capability of hot swapping devices and network segments, without having to reset the network or perform a power cycle.
All in all, the Sercos III automation bus is designed to meet the demands and requirements of numerous automation applications, without sacrificing performance.
Read more about Sercos III.