At the recent SPS/IPC show in Nuremberg, Lenze announced an extension of industrial Ethernet support for its 9400 servo drive range. Alongside existing PROFINET and POWERLINK modules, Lenze has now added EtherCAT to the range. As a result, all 9400 servo drives can have connectivity to external devices with EtherCAT.
This industrial real-time Ethernet bus is characterised by high baud rates thanks to the one-total-frame protocol and the associated minimised telegram overheads. Even when transmitting the smallest data volumes such as those commonly encountered in automation, the entire bandwidth provided by Ethernet is fully utilised. Therefore, cycle times of 30µs can still be reached with more than 1000 inputs/outputs. EtherCAT is ideally suited to line and tree topologies giving flexible possibilities that are particularly useful when wiring complex systems.
In particular, using the Lenze EtherCAT module allows the CANopen protocol to be transmitted (CANopen over EtherCAT : CoE). As a result, upgrading from CANopen to EtherCAT is simple.
Users of CANopen will also be familiar with DS301 port mapping, which is compatible with the EtherCAT module. This function determines which of the servo controller’s internal data objects is extracted by the module via process data channels. The controller’s process and service data (parameterisation and diagnostics data) can both be read and written via the EtherCAT module. This allows parameter setting and diagnostics of distributed Lenze drives via a remote central computer in a shared system.
The new EtherCAT module from Lenze fits seamlessly into the modular system of the 9400 Servo Drives servo drive range in terms of function and design. Thanks to comprehensive fieldbus and industrial Ethernet support, users of Lenze products enjoy the highest degree of flexibility when selecting a communication bus and network topology, and can therefore select the optimum implementation for their tasks.