Safety bus makes first stop at Drives & Controls
15 Jan 2000
Last month's Drives & Controls exhibition in Telford provided the first opportunity of the year for many companies to launch new products - or at least give a first airing to recent introductions.
In addition to its new Windows CE-based machine interfaces (see PE February 1999, p11), Pilz was busy promoting the benefits of SafetyBUS p, its new communications bus for safety-related networking of plant and machinery. Safe input and output is via decentralised I/Os, with safe data processing in the controller.
Controllers for the open SafetyBUS p system are now available from Pilz in its PSS range of programmable safety controllers. These have built-in redundancy, with a `safe condition' always being assumed. Where halting a process is not safe, fault-tolerant controllers are used.
Pilz says the objective is the same: to detect potential problems via redundancy, feedback, self-checking and so on - but the processing of and reaction to the information is different.
