In order to reduce the amount of integration effort between devices, the industrial automation group of Advantech has launched the APAX-6572 with a combined APAX Data Acquisition and Control (DA&C) technology and Embedded Automation Controller. This device is best suited for factory-wide DA&C applications and as an auxiliary control for unit operations.
The automation controller contains an Intel Atom D510 1.66GHz, 2GB RAM controller with three GbE LAN, two COM ports, one VGA and four USB 2.0 ports. The APAX controller comes with fours slots for expansion. Using this method, customers can install four APAX-5090P modules to provide a maximum of 18 COM ports; four APAX-5095P CAN port cards for a maximum of eight CAN ports, or a combination of the two. A maximum of 32 APAX DA&C I/O modules can also be applied to the this system providing a maximum of 768 Digital I/O and 192 Analogue I/O points.
The APAX-6572 integrates the three main elements of automation, Computing, Control and Communication, into an open system architecture with a small footprint, thereby providing users with an easier and friendlier environment to deploy the control logics. The APAX-6572 supports the IEC-61161-3 standard for LD, FBD, IL, SFC, C, C++ and C# as well as .NET class libraries, thereby providing an open and flexible programming environment so programmers can concentrate on one controller and don’t need to switch languages between controllers.
To help engineers handle faults and increase system availability, the APAX-6572 includes many innovative technologies including an Advanced Watch Dog Timer to provide alarms and self healing before the system is reset; also included is an Active Health Check which monitors the hardware and triggers alarms if a fault is found. Finally, to ensure that the system is always available a backup system is provided to take over when the master is out of action.
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