Ensuring the Interoperability of Drive and Motion Control Applications

To ensure that everything runs smoothly in drive technology, clean interfaces between all components involved are required

The long-established certification process of PI (PROFIBUS & PROFINET International) ensures that users around the world can rely on uniform and interoperable communication and application interfaces.

To further ensure the interoperability of drive and motion control applications, certification of products with the Encoder profile will be available starting immediately.

The Encoder profile belongs to the application profile class and, together with the PROFIdrive profile, defines uniform interoperable application interfaces for the different fields of use of drive technology and motion control based on PROFINET and PROFIBUS.

For a fully-automatic sequence and an automatic evaluation of test cases, the proven PROFIdrive profile tester will be used for the encoder certification test. A special test script set was developed for encoder certification, which is available for the latest profile tester version and controls the test sequence and the test evaluation for encoder devices in the test system. This increases the quality, reduces the test effort, and keeps certification costs low.

Like the PROFINET tester, the PROFIdrive profile tester with the encoder test scripts is also available to PI members as a free download. Encoder manufacturers thus have the opportunity to use the test system during development so that the certification test can be performed on a pretested device. The certification test will be performed by experienced PROFIdrive test labs.

Companies interested in obtaining the PROFIdrive profile tester will need to be members of PI. Click here for details of UK membership, or email Bob Squirrell, UK Chairman uk@profibus.com or call on 0208 144 9597