PROFIBUS Troubleshooting Tool Demo: Topology

by Grid Connect Team

This is part 9 of our 9 part series, PROFIBUS Troubleshooting Tool Demonstration

The last part that is included in the troubleshooting kit Ultra Plus is the tab called “Topology,” which is located directly to the right of the bar graph tab. This can be used to calculate the topology, which is basically a drawing of the instillation. It tells the user who is connected to who in this daisy chain of PROFIBUS cables. When starting this up, it is important that the user selects where on the bus they are connected. In this case, we plugged the ProfiCore Ultra onto the PG connector on the PLC/master. So on the drop down menu, we would select master. There will also be a few warnings presented in the topology detection settings. The one that is really crucial to note is that this topology detection only works on 500 kbps and 1.5 Mbps. If the network being used is faster or slower than that then this tool will not work very well as it is a very difficult task to measure the topology. There has to be a pretty clean network in order to run this scan, but once it is complete, the results are very reliable. If there are reflections and noise on a network when a topology scan is running, it will get confused by those reflections because it is trying to measure the distance in much the way the ScopeWare did, but without a human helping. When we run the topology it will begin to calculate the distances between the devices. Again we are using a small training kit so there is not a lot of cable, maybe seven meters total. This will generate a map of the instillation. Then, a report can be generated using the report function. This allows the user to print all of this information out and save it for future reference. When there is a problem, the ScopeWare is used to determine the distance of the problem, then the diagram will help direct the user of where exactly to go.

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