As I said in yesterday’s entry the pitch at this year’s event was all about making hardwired reality of the notion of motion in the CIP sales message. It’s also the reason that the eye-catching papers presented to a full house Technical Track meeting were all tied to this premise.

The session kicked off with a report investigating genuinely new ground: how to make IEEE1588 time stamping work efficiently with Gigabit Ethernet by using top priority framing for the PTP sync data. Rockwell’s Anatoly Moldovansky gave an account of an experimental set-up using special hardware at each end of a link to obtain the 2ns set-up time on the time-stamp data required to make the link work.

Apparently the link delivered a worst case 50ns error through a standard unmanaged Gigabit switch, purely by according PTP data framing highest priority. I have been requested to keep my entries light but you can’t help thinking that if tightly time-synched data can be sent at giga speeds without special network node hardware, then perhaps the answer to effective motion control really does lie in frame prioritisation rather than special network silicon.

More revelations follow tomorrow so watch this space!

Posted 27/02/2006 @ 18:27:34 | IE General News