Industrial Ethernet and new possibilities - Simplifying function tests of industrial devices

Abstract: What do you do if you are implementing a new fieldbus protocol in your embed- ded industrial system and want to test it? This was the question that a group of engineers at ABB Corporate Research was asking themselves. Normally, the easiest way would probably be to buy a matching device supporting the same protocol and hook it up to the system. You might also need some equipment to listen in on the traffic between the two, so you’d need to buy that too. But what if you are working with a limited budget? Or what if this protocol is fairly new, and matching devices are hard to find? Or what if you want to test cases that can’t normally be achieved with normal usage? Normally, with traditional fieldbus standards, this could be complicated. You would probably need an additional sample of your new system, with some cus- tom made test code, and use this to test the original system. This is not a bad method, but this report will give an example of the new possibilities that comes with the new Ethernet base fieldbus standards emerging on the market today. It will highlight the possibility to create a test tool for your industrial system to use on a standard PC. ”Why?” you might ask. The report suggests that this solution is cheap, fast and flexible. First of all, no special hardware was needed, which had a posi- tive impact on cost. The only thing used was a PC and some standard office equipment. Second, once the test tool was created, new test cases was really fast and easy to make. The test tool was designed to function as a general framework for creating dynamic test sequences based on Ethernet. Third, the tool is flexible enough to test a lot of different cases, even cases not allowed by the standard. It made it possible to test cases that would have required the use of several samples of test system simultaneously to work. Also, because Ethernet is such a well known standard, there are a lot of existing software tools at your disposal. For example, free software for capturing and analyzing the test results was used during the tests. Furthermore, since the test tool was designed to be easily extendable to handle more protocols, it is even more flexible and useable for future similar problems.