EasySlave Enables Inexpensive Development of Sercos Slave Devices

Santa Rosa Beach, FL, December 02, 2011 --(PR.com)-- At the recent SPS/IPC Show, Sercos International introduced the Sercos EasySlave, an FPGA-based single-chip controller for simple Sercos III slave devices. It has a real time channel with one input and one output connection, and supports cycle times as low as 31.25 usec. An IP core is provided as a netlist for the Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA family. The IP core contains all the functions of a Sercos slave connection, including the associated software library for I/O devices (e.g., analog inputs, encoders). I/O applications are synchronized in the Sercos cycle. “Sercos EasySlave can be integrated in an application with minimal effort in order to achieve various I/O activations,” according to Peter Lutz, Managing Director of Sercos International.

Technical support for the EasySlave is provided by Steinbeis Transfer Center for Systems Technology (TZS) in Esslingen, Germany. TZS offers an EasySlave evaluation kit to facilitate a quick and easy introduction to Sercos slave development. The evaluation kit includes a development board based on a Xilinx Spartan-6 XC6SLX9 FPGA and can be extended using plug-in modules. The evaluation kit includes all other required material and documents (Ethernet cable, power supply, and documentation).

“The EasySlave evaluation kit makes Sercos III slave development easy. Steinbeis-TZS will be happy to provide assistance in the integration and commissioning of EasySlave,” states Professor Reinhard Keller of Steinbeis-TZS.

Various EasySlave licensing models are available from Sercos International, with Sercos member companies offered special prices. In addition, a license-free bitstream IP core version with a limited functionality is available, under the product name EasySlave-IO.

About Sercos
Sercos is one of the world’s leading digital interfaces for communication between controls, drives, I/O and decentralized peripheral devices. Sercos has been used in machine engineering for more than 25 years and is implemented in over 500,000 applications with around 3 million real time nodes. With the latest generation, Sercos III, Sercos can be used as a universal automation bus for machine production and system implementation.

Sercos International is an association of users and manufacturers that is in charge of technical development, standardization, conformance testing, certification and marketing for the Sercos automation bus. Based in Germany, the organization presently has more than 60 member companies located around the world and has liaison offices in North America and Asia.

Sercos International cooperates with ODVA in developing and marketing their common CIP Safety protocol. Among others, additional cooperative efforts have been established with the FDT group in order to include the Sercos bus in FDT’s specifications for cross-manufacturer and cross-product connection of software tools, and with the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) to promote the use of open source software in machine production and factory automation.

Download a photo of the circuit board for the EasySlave evaluation kit from: http://www.sercos.com/pr_photos/easyslave_steinbeis.jpg.

In North America, Contact:
Sercos N.A.
405 Loblolly Bay Drive
Santa Rosa Beach, FL 32459
Ronald Larsen, Managing Director
Tel: 850/660-1293 or 800/573-7267
info@ sercos.com
www.sercos.com

In Europe, Contact
sercos international e. V.
Kueblerstrasse 1
73079 Suessen Germany
Peter Lutz, Managing Director
Tel: +49-7162-94 68-65
p.lutz@sercos.de
www.sercos.org

###