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Guest Richard Schmidt

Ethernet connection to PLC/5

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Everybody. I need help setting up a home PC/PLC network. I have A PC An ethernet router with wireless and hardwired ports A wireless bridge A PLC 5/40e A tranceiver to interface between the 5/40E and the CAT-5 I know... All the IP addresses of my hardware ( I just set it up) All about the PLC5/50E (I'm talking on DF1-1 now) I need to learn. The relationship between the (PLC's IP address, the broadcast address, subnet mask, gateway mask) and my network. I hate to sound ignorant, but I've been struggling for a couple of evenings trying to get this running. Best Regards, Rich

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Making network can be frustrating The simplest thing is to make a small star network with static addressing. If you are new to this, first thing to do is probably to make a plan on paper. Count devices you want to network and choose subnet mask. Note that subnet mask is a 4byte number such as 255.255.255.0 or 255.255.255.192. The later one would look like this when converted to binary form: 11111111 . 11111111 . 11111111 . 11000000 What the heck is this? Simple, there are 6 "zeroes" in our example. This is determining number in a IP address that can be varied. The "ones" are part of the IP address that must be same in each IP address for all devices on same network. Important: Subnet mask must start with "1" and end with "0". Also all "1"s must be grouped together, all"0"s must be grouped together. So if you choose to use such mask (255.255.255.192), you could have max. 2^6=64 devices on your network (this is just for you to understand the concept). In this case, all devices would have first 3 bytes of the IP address same, and the last one would be unique for each device. For example: Device1 (PC) IP: 192.168.0.13 Mask: 255.255.255.192 Device1 (PC1) IP: 192.168.0.1 Mask: 255.255.255.192 Device2 (PC2) IP: 192.168.0.2 Mask: 255.255.255.192 Device3 (PLC) IP: 192.168.0.3 Mask: 255.255.255.192 Device4 (Xerox Printer) IP: 192.168.0.4 Mask: 255.255.255.192 Device5 (Fish tank) IP: 192.168.0.5 Mask: 255.255.255.192 etc. As you can see, subnet mask is the same, the begin of the IP addresses is the same, the last number is varied (remember the group of zeros in the subnet mask?). If you choose subnetmask 255.255.0.0 for example, you could have some 65535 devices etc. Enough of theory, get a hub or switch and couple of STRAIGHT ethernet cables (not crossover cables!!!). Connect all devices to hub ports. Do not use port labeled "Uplink". Power up everything and start DOS box on your PC and check if you can reach all of the devices by pinging them. To do so just type: PING 192.168.0.3 and hit enter to check if you can reach that node. Don't even think of doing any other software configuration or software troubleshooting if you cannot ping the targets. If ping works, hardware setup is ok and now you can try to connect from one to other device. Now back to the "Uplink". This is used to cascade Hubs or Switches. Crossover cable is used as direct connection between two ethernet devices (without hub or switch). You might want to try to use crossover (instead of straight cable) to connect one device to hub or switch. In this case you should plug it into Uplink port. As a side note, there are "smart" switches out there which are supposed to recognise type of each plugged cable and internally match it. My experience is that these devices can work but are not quite reliable yet, specially if used with "wild" hardware (not PCs). Maybe next generation will be better. Hope this helps, regards, panic mode Hope this helps Edited by panic mode

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