Omron FINS Ethernet Communication Interface API from DASTEC Corporation allows the user to implement bi-directional communications to exchange data between applications running on a PC based or embedded system with other peer devices supporting the Omron FINS Ethernet protocol. The peer devices can be Omron C, CV, CS1, or CJ1-Series PLC, other host computers or even other system applications using the API.
The API of Omron FINS Ethernet Communication Interface enables a system to acts as a client to other Omron FINS peers, initiating write and read operations on behalf of the system applications. The API also allows the system to emulate an Omron C, CV, CS1, or CJ1 Series PLC to respond to write and read request and thus acts as a “virtual PLC” to other Omron FINS peers. The API is available for various combinations of hardware platforms and operating systems can be used with C, C++ or Visual Basic.
The API contains of two component functionalities, server side and client side. The client side functionality is implemented with a single API library. Server side functionality is implemented with a library or executable pair. These components manage together all aspects of the protocols and data exchange including responding to peers with proper acknowledgements, error or success codes and protocol data byte ordering. The system application only need to deal with the data values exchanged in native byte order. The user can employ either the API’s client, server or both functionalities with minimal implementation of code.
A system application can initiate write and read to peers by simply calling the client library functions. The functions include the ability to create handle for the peer device and then using those handle to call client’s library write and read functions.
Client API supports:
• Defining multiple device of Omron C, CV, CS1, or CJ1 Series
• Function to read data from and write data to define device
• Flag data can be written/read as packed bits.
• Word data can be read/written as 16-bit, 32-bit, or as ASCII values
• Multiple user applications can use the API client