Serial to WiFi Adapter

[tmoulder]

Greeting all!

 

I am about to start a Visilogic project on an existing machine that will force me to surrender my last available ethernet socket, and it is causing me great emotional anguish.

I was considering a serial to wifi adapter to allow me to at least keep my precious wireless connectivity, even if it means sacrificing overall communication speed.  Has anybody else done this successfully, and if so, what did you use?

 

Thanks!

TM

[Flex727]

Sounds like what you want is a serial to ethernet adapter. They are readily available, though I've never tried to use one. Did you have wifi before?

[Joe Tauser]

You may want to consider juggling your sockets in your code.  You can re-init them on the fly.  What are you doing over Ethernet?

Or change it to a V700, which has 8 sockets.

Joe T.

[Flex727]

7 hours ago, Joe Tauser said:

You may want to consider juggling your sockets in your code.

I've done this quite successfully. I have a V1210 in the field that connects (using MODBUS IP) to about a dozen other PLCs, one at a time, by connecting and disconnecting sequentially. I could do 4 at a time, but I wanted to keep the code simple and there weren't any time constraints. The connect/disconnect/connect process is lengthy (maybe 2-5 seconds), but works reliably.

[tmoulder]

Thanks guys,

My sockets are tied up doing real-time communications to a couple of robots, a camera system, and now a motion controller, all on Modbus TCP.  The latency of a juggling scheme would be fatal.

And I would give my last remaining tooth for the V700 to be available in a V570 form factor.

So I guess I'll pick out an adapter and see how far I get.  I'll keep you posted on the results.

Thanks again!

 

TM

[Flex727]

1 hour ago, tmoulder said:

And I would give my last remaining tooth for the V700 to be available in a V570 form factor.

The V700 is only about half an inch wider than a V570 and is nearly the exact same height (at least from a cutout standpoint).

[tmoulder]

It's redrawing 40+ screens that makes me hesitant...

[tmoulder]

So I tried out an adapter.  It seems to work okay with Win7 on bare metal, but was almost completely incompatible with a virtual machine.

I guess I'm going to have to learn to live with a serial port... argh...

[Ausman]

I've had a variety of cheap to expensive serial to wifi adapters all work fine....in fact a piece of cake with Unitronics stuff, unlike other brands.

Maybe you could use a dedicated cheap mini puter that gets the wifi link, so that you access things indirectly via a remote connection from the VM to the mini puter?  Which would likely get around the finicky VM "meant to work but don't" issues.

cheers,

Aus