E-stop over Ethernet

rpoet said:

That is my understanding as well. I'm trying for something a little more robust.

After looking at the available options, it appears more and more like this may need to be another in-house designed solution. Nothing quite meets our requirements. Entertainment is an odd duck to be sure. We use components from industrial controls and automation in ways that manufacturers never conceived of. When I call Parker or AutomationDirect, they always seem fascinated by what we do. Our gear is usually running a packaging plant or welding cars together on an assembly line.

We use it to make art and help tall a story.


-rpoet

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Coming to the party late (3.5 years late), but have you guys ever looked at Tait Towers gear? This does exactly what you are looking for and is SIL3 rated. http://info.taittowers.com/hubfs/NAV ESA_CutSheet_01252017_v1.pdf?t=1488389047558

That being said, it is pricey. You could do a similar thing with programming safety logic for every position an e-stop could be located at, and then use a jumper plug if there isn't a stagehand there during that show. They effectively do the same thing with the ESA (though it's more slick and doesn't rely on jumper plugs).

One aspect of this that I'm having trouble with is buried in your initial statement and may have been missed by others:

...alongside normal TCP traffic.

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I might be wrong, but I believe that when you use a saftety PLC and remote safety I/O, you can have other non-safe I/O traffic if the SAME PLC, but it will need to be a dedicated network, not one shared with other devices. The Safety over Ethernet concept requires that the safety functions have primacy in the network traffic, so the Safety PLC must be in total control of all traffic on that network. So if you want to sister this into existing network traffic, that alone will likely make this a non-starter. You can likely use the MEDIA (wires, managed switches etc) but it would need to be dedicated to this function.

Oh damn, suckered in by a zombie post...

jraef said:

...I might be wrong...

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jraef, you just might be?

I don't have the time right now to "get into it". Nor do I want to resurrect this thread on a tangent. So I'll be brief...

CIP Safety data may traverse the physical network with other CIP and non-CIP data within a converged IACS. You may have CIP Safety, CIP Motion and CIP I/O data all on the same wire. What is used to distinguish and prioritize the different traffic types is Quality of Service (QoS).

Here is a previous post which only brushes the surface of this subject...

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showpost.php?p=689532&postcount=6

Regards,
George