Advantech introduces the EKI-1521/1522 Serial Machine servers, which allow RS-232/422/485 serial devices to be remotely monitored, managed and controlled over Ethernet and Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Equipped with dual 10/100Base-TX Ethernet ports and dual Media Access Controllers (MACs), these innovative devices ensure data transmission even in the event of a network link failure.
With redundant Ethernet connections, communication is not interrupted in the event of a network problem. With one connection automatically assigned as primary and the other as backup, loss of the primary connection initiates an immediate and automatic switch-over to the backup, ensuring data integrity and peace-of-mind.
The EKI-1521 and EKI-1522 offer a number of conventional operating modes that allow connections to be initiated by either attached serial devices or remote Ethernet hosts using both UDP/IP and TCP/IP protocols. For applications beyond simple point-to-point connections, two new multi-access modes allow one-to-many and many-to-one communications. The first allows up to five Ethernet hosts to access a single serial device and the second allows a single serial device to simultaneously send data to as many as 16 Ethernet-connected hosts.
In addition to these exciting new features, serial transmission speeds have been increased to 921Kbps, allowing a much broader range of serial devices to be network enabled. More importantly, optimizations in serial to Ethernet handling have yielded an ultra fast round-trip latency of less than 10 milliseconds where network traffic is not an issue, allowing the use of timing-sensitive serial protocols and increased polling rates.
