Alpha Gear Ternary drive

Did anyone had chance of working with Ternary drives from Alpha Gear?
We have to add one of the units to existing machine and would like to get any help we can. One of the difficulties is that we don't have that plc here to do initial setup (or any other system with profibus because this is what Ternary is equiped with).

Panic,

I have four of the Ternary 100mm linear actuators implimented so far using DeviceNet. Plan is for six more. I would highly recommend getting some kind of processor to do a test setup on before they go out on the floor. It took myself, another programmer, and the local distributor a couple weeks to get the program done just to send commands to and from the Ternary. Although, the distributor did say that DeviceNet was not the recommended way to communicate to the actuators, nor had he seen it done before. I don't know if it will be easier with Profibus; I've never worked with it. Brush up on your hexidecimal; that's the only way the Ternary communicates.

Other than those things, the Ternary's have been very good. Accuracy is very good, and they take a some abuse. They are doing up a move every 600 ms at max speed in the application I'm working on. Let me know if I (or anyone else on this great forum) can help out.

Patrick

after reading a bit more (and checking devicenet sample code they gave me)
i think i have it figured out. once the ternary is booted and running in i/o
data exchange mode, comunication is absolutely identical for any fieldbus
(through mapped 8 bytes in and 8 bytes out). the only part that might
get tricky is getting to that point (setup node address, etc.).
hopefully this can be done using GX Configurator DP and if not
i would have to find out what some of the bytes are.

For example:

DA = destination address
SA = source address (i'm wondering why would this be needed but who cares)
FC = function code (not sure yet what function code this is supposed to be,
manual is not clear on this one)
FCS = frame checking sequence (sounds like checksum but again, manual is
not clear on this and it doesn't explain what part of message should be
included in checksum calc and what method to use).