Allen Bradley Ethernet Protocol - CSP or CIP

We are developing an Ethernet device driver for the Allen Bradley SLC 5/05. We found a few documents in Allen Bradley's website, and also the EIP/CIP protocol specification.

Anybody know where we can download the CSP protocol specification? Is the CSP easier to implement than the CIP?

Same problem

Hi, I am also looking for documentation about the CSP protocol. Did you have any luck finding it?

His post was 5 years ago - I'm guessing that he didn't.

Lately it's been a raft of "I'm writing my own driver" posts.

You won't find any detailed information about CSP; even though it is roughly an implementation of the same commands as DF1, it remains an Allen-Bradley proprietary protocol and is licensed by A-B to noncompetitive vendors. All competitive implementations have come from reverse engineering.

Any modern author is going to want to implement the PCCC protocol over EtherNet/IP, because that will give them access to all the MicroLogix/SLC family controllers with Ethernet, the PLC-5 controllers with Ethernet, and some data access to ControlLogix family controllers.

The developer's information from A-B is summarized here:

http://www.rockwellautomation.com/enabled/guides.html

They are right, we couldn't find any documents on the CSP protocol.
We ended up implemented an EIP/PCCC driver for our system.

You can find the EIP/PCCC information in the following document:
http://www.rockwellautomation.com/enabled/pdf/eipexp1_2.pdf

If you want to communicate with a ControlLogix or CompactLogix PLC without any PLC/SLC message mapping then you will need to look in to the EIP/native or CIP protocol.

This driver was written by reverse engineering the CSP protocol:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/abethernet/

You can pick it apart and get some of the details. This may be of some help too:

http://iatips.wikispaces.com/Rockwell-CSP-Header

I would definitely recommend using Ethernet/IP (CIP) because it is supported by a wider range of hardware.