Solution for connecting fieldbus Profibus to common PC without use of special hardware will be proposed in this project. The work implements bus control unit (master) for Profibus DP (Distributed Peripherals), which is most widely used variation of this standard. It's designed for communication between control units and distributed peripherals (sensors, actuators). Commonly used solutions are expensive, because they are built on special expansion cards, which are using their own processors, customer's circuits or another circuits with enough power to meet high requirements of Profibus.
On the other side, this work allows for connecting Profibus to standard serial port RS-232 or to simple PCI expansion card based on UART circuit. Profibus DP Master is created as software implementation and special features of hardware implementations are substituted by maximal use of common means in PC. This was mainly possible by creating Profibus DP Master as system driver for Windows NT/2000/XP. Moreover application interface is compatible with solutions from Siemens company, which allows for simple replacement.
Useful links:
March 16 2004 - ProfiM 1.0.0 released
As features are added, we will make milestone releases based on stable versions.
| Date | Download | Comments |
| March 16, 2004 | profim-1.0.0-bin.zip | First release |
| March 16, 2004 | profim-1.0.0-src.zip | Source |
| March 25, 2004 | profim-poster.jpg | Poster |
| March 25, 2004 | profim-doc.pdf | Documentation |
