Hi there,

Well, it sounds like there is not that much interest in having such driver.

I will not spend my time writing a driver that nobody cares about.

Anyway, thanks for your replies.

BR,
Steve

Hi again Steve,

I'm not that sure that there is no interest in a driver for the cifX-cards. The more support there exist for different buses the more user-friendly Proview will be. I'm quite sure a lot of people would be interested in a Profinet-card for example

I'm on a trip to the USA for the moment, that's the reason for that I didn't write more in this thread. Sorry for that.

/Robert

Hi Robert,

Have a nice trip.
I will wait for your feed back on the CIF stuff.

BR,
Steve

Hi Steve,

I studied this a little bit more. Great thing that it is the same card for different Real-time ethernet buses. Also very nice that it is based on the general UIO kernel module and only a user space library is needed to communicate with the card.

It shouldn't be very difficult to implement the Profinet-type of card. Proview already has a built-in Profinet configurator so all configuration should be possible to do from the application.

One question I have is how many Profinet devices the card supports? On one place it says 32 but if you read the specific Profinet-documentation it says 128. I hope the later is the true figure.

BR,

Robert

Hi Robert,

Thanks for showing interest in Hilscher boards.

Yes, the Linux driver is based on UIO :
www.osadl.org/UIO.uio.0.html

Yes, I can see that on the web page it says 32 and in www.hilscher.fr/files_manuals/CIFX-RE_usermanual_en.pdf it says 128 devices.
Of course, 128 is the right number. Hilscher firmware has improved a lot and the web page has not been updated accordingly.

From what I had seen in the documentation www.proview.se/files/doc/pwr_doc/en_us/man_iog.pdf, only Profibus configuration is supported in Proview.
Is there some documentation on Profinet configuration ?
Although Profibus and Profinet share a lot, it seems that a proper configuration tool is needed.

BR,
Steve

Hi Steve,

There actually exist a configuration tool for Profinet, although it is not documented at all for the moment. There is a class in the Profibus-classes named 'pncontrollersoftingpnak' (since we are using a profinet stack from softing). Create an object of this class in the node-hierarchy. As a child to this object you create an object of class 'PnDevice'. Right click on this and choose 'configure'. This will read the gsdml-file and you will be able to configure your device. When saved a xml-file will be created for this device that will be read when run-time starts. All information needed to configure the device is included.

I think all of this can be used to implement support for the cifX-card with profinet. I'm looking forward to this.

BR

Robert