Converting Powerflexs to ethernet from devicenet

[Learning2Program]

Hello,

This will be my first time converting powerflex 40's and 400's from devicenet to ethernet. I did some research, and it seems I will need to add a 22-COMM-E to each of the drives to make this possible.

My main question is, I have about 15 drives that need to be converted, is there a way to chain the ethernet together to reduce ethernet port usage? Or is there a downside to this when there are faults on the drives? I will be connecting these to a ENBT card.

I am able to get a bigger switch, I just didn't know if there was a better way of doing this.

Thanks in advance!

 

[TheWaterboy]

Would a DeviceNet to EIP gateway be a viable option? Would only need to add one piece of hardware...

 

[Learning2Program]

Would a DeviceNet to EIP gateway be a viable option? Would only need to add one piece of hardware...

Potentially, if the drive would have similar ethernet functionality in rslogix 5000. What would the piece of hardware be? I would definitely like to look into it.

 

[TheWaterboy]

One example would be: https://www.rtautomation.com/product/460esdm/

As the kind of thing you could look into.

 

[Ken Roach]

Converting from DeviceNet to EtherNet/IP isn't just a simple matter of switching the comms path. You're going to need to do some careful work understanding your DeviceNet installation first.

For the drives, you've got two choices.

The most straightforward is to replace each 22-COMM-D with a 22-COMM-E. That will cost the most, and require a switch port for each drive (there's no 22-COMM-ER).

The functionality in Studio 5000 will be a little different, of course. You'll have an applet that allows you to connect to and configure the drive from within Studio 5000, rather than having to get out CCW or RSNetworx.

If your DeviceNet was configured with the automatic tag generator tool then there might be a module-defined datatype already in your program that you can migrate to the module-defined tag created when you add a 22-COMM-E based drive to the I/O tree in Studio 5000.

If it wasn't, then you are going to have to take a closer look at how the data was mapped into your 1756-DNB/1769-SDN/other scanner.

You also have some options with "multi drive mode", either mounting a 22-COMM-E to one of your drives and daisy-chaining from there, or getting the externally mounted box (22-XCOMM-DC-BASE) to mount a 22-COMM-E into.

Read Chapter 7 of the 22-COMM-E user manual for a good overview of the trade-offs between a dedicated adapter module and multi-drive mode. The performance needs and functional associations of your drives are going to guide the decision about which drives get grouped together from a single Ethernet adapter.