Wireless communication offers many opportunities and benefits for manufacturing companies. What WLAN and Bluetooth have long demonstrated in the retail sector could not be used for industrial purposes due to the lack of reliability, low availability, and low speed. This is now changing thanks to IO-Link Wireless and Hilscher.
Hilscher has extended its IO-Link Wireless portfolio and is now offering the netFIELD Device IO-Link Wireless Bridge. The new Bridge seamlessly networks all IO-Link Class A sensors with an IO-Link Wireless Master and implements them in your Real-Time Ethernet systems.
The solution offers reliable real-time communication with transmission cycles down to 5 ms at a wireless point-to-point range of up to 10 meters. It reduces cabling efforts and diminishes potential sources of error such as cable breaks. When implementing IO-Link wireless, user benefit from Hilscher’s professional software support which encompasses, amongst other things, tools to configure their IO-Link Wireless devices.
ilscher’s IO-Link Wireless Bridge is complemented by the netFIELD IO-Link Wireless Master. The new wireless Master is utilizing the existing IO-Link standard according to IEC 61131-9 and allows for 16 Sensors and actuators to be networked, twice as much as conventional hardwired IO-Link masters. User can integrate Hilscher’s IO-Link Wireless Master into PROFINET, Ethernet/IP as well as EtherCAT networks.
The IO-Link Wireless technology provides advantages wherever tethered solutions are hardly to realize. Such use cases can be:
- Robots with high demands concerning movement such as cobots
- Transport systems with numerous junctions and branches
- Autonomous transport vehicles
- Clean rooms