Magicbus?

kittydog42

Member
Join Date
Sep 2005
Location
Naperville
Posts
232
I am proposing a new open protocol. I am going to tentatively call it Magicbus. Recently on a job, the control electrician neglected to wire any of our sensors back to the panel. When my boss found out, he said, "How do they expect them to work, magic?" This is how great ideas are born.

Magicbus will be a little different than other protocols in that it will be combination of software and hardware. What would be the point of using Magicbus over a typical Ethernet or RS-485 connection? The idea here is to install Magicbus components in a system, and it will all work as intended.

Would it actually work over infrared? 802.11b? Bluetooth? What are the different formats variables would take? Who cares about technical mumbo-jumbo like that. Magicbus just goes with the flow; in fact, if you throw a stray BACnet or Lon component into the system, the Magicbus network just says "whatever", and automatically integrates it. Just don't abuse the privilege.

Anybody want to get in on the ground floor? I have a great idea for a theme song as well...
 
Artist: Who, The
Song: Magic Bus
Album:
[" " CD]

Every day I get in the queue (Too much, Magic Bus)
To get on the bus that takes me to you (Too much, Magic Bus)
I'm so nervous, I just sit and smile (Too much, Magic Bus)
You house is only another mile (Too much, Magic Bus)

Thank you, driver, for getting me here (Too much, Magic Bus)
You'll be an inspector, have no fear (Too much, Magic Bus)
I don't want to cause no fuss (Too much, Magic Bus)
But can I buy your Magic Bus? (Too much, Magic Bus)

Nooooooooo!

I don't care how much I pay (Too much, Magic Bus)
I wanna drive my bus to my baby each day (Too much, Magic Bus)
I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it ... (You can't have it!)
Thruppence and sixpence every day
Just to drive to my baby
Thruppence and sixpence each day
'Cause I drive my baby every way

Magic Bus, Magic Bus, Magic Bus ...

I said, now I've got my Magic Bus (Too much, Magic Bus)
I said, now I've got my Magic Bus (Too much, Magic Bus)
I drive my baby every way (Too much, Magic Bus)
Each time I go a different way (Too much, Magic Bus)

I want it, i want it, I want it, I want it ...

Every day you'll see the dust (Too much, Magic Bus)
As I drive my baby in my Magic Bus (Too much, Magic Bus


Contact S&M at http://www.plcs.net/ (Too much, Magic Bus)
 
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Where is the magic? I don't see it!

elevmike said:
There is a Magic Buss. (of sorts). It's a wireless sensor network. You guys just forgot the modules...

Zigbee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee

$3500 entry fee. No problem we can pass that on to the consumers!
Low data rates. We can hardly wait.
128K of code just to run implement zigbee! When do you expect the CPU to have time to run all this code? One can easily get a full blown TCP stack in 128K of code. I think it can be as small as 64K.

Profibus DP is much leaner and faster.
All I can say is Yet Another Bus.

Right now my vote is for IEEE-1588.
http://ieee1588.nist.gov/
Click on the tutorial and check out what companies are writing the different chapters. When Siemens and Rockwell are both supporting this I think it will happen. This will make synchronizing multiple drives over Ethernet possible.
 
The control industry is full of analytical sorts who all know the best way to do things. Been there, done that, tried that. This is better than that. That is better than this. The best part about Magicbus is that none of that will matter anymore. Magicbus will allow stuff to get done, with little more that the college try. It doesn't matter how it works because it just will. Sort of like it doesn't matter how we, as humans, got here. We're just here.

That is the concept. Imagine I am the project engineer; now that I have described what I want, it is up to the engineering automatons to make it a reality! Give them just enough cheese to keep them productive, and they will reward you with faithful service.
 
Every "bus" that has come along in the last 20 years has been heralded as a "magic bus" that will unify all platforms with a common system blah blah blah. I remember hearing these exact words when Boeing and IBM released MAP (for those of you who were still pooping in your pants at that time, it stood for Manufacturing Automation Protocol). There was a big hooplah and national roll-out, lots of articles, everyone was going to make a gateway, then IBM decided that THEIR gateway would be THE gateway and all other gateways were to bow before them. So instead, everyone started making their OWN magic bus to save the world. Along came Modbus, Modbus Plus, then FieldBus, Profibus, Sercos, Unibus, Thisbus, Thatbus, Kissmybus, Ethernet, DeviceNet, ProfiNet HairNet SuperdooperNet, BasketballNet, WhatNet...



It never makes a difference. Greed always gets in the way. Always.
 
Much more useful, would be an inexpensive, universal, physical and protocol layer converter. But, in this case "Inexpensive" and "Universal" cant go together. It's the engineers dilemma -- Cheap, Fast, or Correct - Pick 2.

There are enough bus structures out there already. Too many, in fact. I've got more than one line that has three or more discrete, seperate, networks, different cabling (or even worse, nearly the same cabling - AB RIO/DH+ = nightmare), different protocols, with different levels of functionality. The last thing I want, is yet another one.
 
Kittydog42,

I'm busy developing an elastic wiring system so that when guys like your control electricians finally get around to wiring-up (using the "measure once, cut twice" method) there's always enough slack to reach the terminals: maybe we should get together to define the physical layer......
 
jraef said:
Every "bus" that has come along in the last 20 years has been heralded as a "magic bus" that will unify all platforms with a common system blah blah blah. I remember hearing these exact words when Boeing and IBM released MAP (for those of you who were still pooping in your pants at that time, it stood for Manufacturing Automation Protocol). There was a big hooplah and national roll-out, lots of articles, everyone was going to make a gateway, then IBM decided that THEIR gateway would be THE gateway and all other gateways were to bow before them. So instead, everyone started making their OWN magic bus to save the world. Along came Modbus, Modbus Plus, then FieldBus, Profibus, Sercos, Unibus, Thisbus, Thatbus, Kissmybus, Ethernet, DeviceNet, ProfiNet HairNet SuperdooperNet, BasketballNet, WhatNet...


I actually laughed out loud....

$
 
The point is, THIS protocol is going to be different! I bet you have never heard that before. As for the elastic wiring, I bet that will make wiring a panel a real snap.

I am having my research department look into a new type of physical communication medium that uses the telepathic and telekinetic powers of certain microrganisms, which eliminates most of the interference issues common to other wireless forms of communication. We are only using microrganisms in the top one percentile, so that they can also execute the task of self configuring the network based on what we want it to do.

So far, we haven't gotten very far.
 
Oh, hey, I was biking through Seattle the other day and ran into the marketing department for Magicbus:

WASEAtrolldk.jpg
 
kittydog42 said:
I am having my research department look into a new type of physical communication medium that uses the telepathic and telekinetic powers of certain microrganisms,

The force is strong in that one hmmmm yes we must be careful....

;)
 
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