J
Joel
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
John said:Having designed many industrial machines with internal RS485 networks,
I agree with all that has gone before with one minor exception. I would
suggest that you design your protocol in readable ASCII. That way you
can make a debugging tool with a laptop running
TeraTerm/HyperTerminal/Whatever and an RS485->RS232 converter.
One of our primary reasons for using 485 is the ease of debugging HW
and SW using a PC terminal. I also agree with the ASCII comment.
Several of our past projects did this, and the customers were impressed
with the ability to do real-time debugging just by connecting up to the
bus.
If you are sure your system will always have one fixed master, then
also look at four-wire RS422. That way there is no possibility of
running into bus contention problems.
The fixed master thing is not cast in stone yet, but we are also
considering that any two of the modules may need to communicate with
each other for some reason. So far we can't see any benefit to using
422.