Migration for FIP/IO devices?

[JerryBartlemay]

Hi All,

I have a customer with several marine sites containing TSX Premium or TSX Micro with FIP/IO distributed I/O devices.  Has anyone found a suitable gateway or other solution to get FIP/IO on an M340 or M580? 

The existing FIP cable must be reused; it is routed in sealed conduits and cannot easily or cheaply be replaced.  So, we need either an Ethernet to FIP Master gateway or a modem of sorts that will transmit another protocol over the same cable.

Thank you,

Jerry Bartlemay

[dnordenberg1]

What I did a few years ago when migrating a premium system with many FIPIO and FIPWAY devices was I kept the premium system as the gateway with minimal amount of code just to make the data available for the M580.

And to future proof the system against failing legacy hardware I prepared new modbus TCP communication and reserved IP addresses for all FIP devices in the DTM browser for IO scanning in the M580 and when the health bit goes high on one of those it switches to reading and writing data to that IP directly instead of via the gateway premium system.

I guess in your case the last part might not be done so easily in reality as I guess you can't get ethernet to those places easily while still running FIPIO. If you replace all those old FIPIO devices at the same time I guess you could reuse the cabling with modbus RTU or industrial DSL. I guess DSL and FIPIO will never work together on the same wire as both are high speed/high frequency and will most likely overlap but modbus RTU/RS485 might work together with FIPIO as they use two very different signaling ways but you may need some kind of filter to split them otherwise the voltage and polarity changes in the RS485 signaling might upset the FIPIO I guess.

HMS/Anybus also seems to have some FIPIO gateway products.