Wireless Ethernet/IP recommendations

[Pudden]

Hi,

There was no mentioning of distance and if in-line of sight..
If the distance is less 200m and in-line of sight, I can warmly recommend our wireless Bluetooth modules:
http://www.anybus.com/products/wireless_bridge.shtml
They use frequency hopping on 8 channels, meaning very hard to disturbe.

My 2 cents

 

[Firejo]

While Produce/Consume does recover it takes anywhere from four to eight seconds to do and more than likely if it drops once it will do it again and rather consistently. With that said if you’re only going to gather a few tags and can tolerate high RPI times then it might work just fine. When P/C sees four or more lost packets within a certain time frame (changes depending on configuration) then it assumes the connection is broken so it closes it and re-opens it. The higher the RPI settings the longer the time frame is that it uses to determine if the connection is broken so the more time you have to get packets through. There are applications out there using P/C with hopping radios that work just fine however there are many more applications (or attempted applications) using P/C with hopping radios that are nightmares. With message instructions the processor opens a connection (which involves requests and acknowledgements), sends the data and then closes the connection. If anywhere in the process things get lost it simply does it again and if it fails altogether then you get an error bit on your message instruction which you can use to either move on or try again. With this method you spend more time but get more reliability. If you don’t need high speed real time data I’d most certainly go with frequency hopping and I must admit I’m bias towards Data-Linc’s equipment. I use it (a lot) and know without a doubt that it works very well.
As to Ubiquiti, I don’t know specific model numbers I just know they make a 900MHz OFDM radio. If the existing plant network is a WiFi network (I.E. you can find it with your smart phone) then it’s not a 900MH system. WiFi is 2.4GHz and/or 5.8GHz only.

 

[ASF]

Great, thanks Firejo. Yes, I know the WiFi is 2.4GHz/5GHz, not 900MHz, I was just thinking of sticking with the brand as they've had good results with it

Thanks for the background on P/C tags vs messaging. Makes a lot of sense now!

 

[Firejo]

Good luck.

 

[andrewf]

Also another consideration for implicit messaging (producer/consumer) is depending on hardware, firmware and configuration it may be multicast data, by default it probably would be. So you would need to manage with a managed switch.

We had a customer using prosoft hardware but had multiple issues, changed over to Ubiquiti with good results.