Heraeus IO-Link Wireless Master for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless communications offer many opportunities and benefits to manufacturing companies. Due to a lack of reliability, low availability and low speed, WLAN and Bluetooth have long demonstrated capabilities in the consumer retail sector that are not available for industrial use. Thanks to the rapid development of IO-Link wireless technology and the ongoing research and development efforts of Herschel Germany, this is changing.

Herschel has announced the first new ‘netFIELD Device IO-Link Wireless Master’, one of the leading solutions for wireless networking of industrial IO-Link sensors and actuators, and the result of a collaboration between Herschel and its technology partner CoreTigo, a high-availability, high-performance, high-performance, high-performance IO-Link device. CoreTigo is a specialist in high-availability wireless industrial communication solutions. Herschel is developing new ways for machine builders and plant operators to simply and flexibly transmit and use a wide range of reliable data in production.

The new IO-Link wireless master is based on the IO-Link standard according to IEC 61131-9 and allows the connection of a total of 16 sensors and actuators - twice as many as a conventional wired IO-Link master. Users can currently use the IO-Link wireless master in PROFINET and EtherNet/IP networks, with an EtherCAT network version to be released soon.

IO-Link wireless technology offers options where wired data lines are not feasible, areas such as:

- Robots with high degrees of freedom, such as collaborative robots

- Transmission systems with many transitions and branches

- Autonomous transport trolleys

- Sanitation

The Herschel IO-Link Wireless Master also includes other features that simplify the use of wireless IO-Link in production:

Blacklisting: The master can hide certain radio frequencies and can therefore also be used with existing wireless networks.

Frequency Hopping: Frequency hopping prevents interference with other devices in the ISM frequency range between 2.4 and 2.48 GHZ.

Scanning pairing service: The integrated function of the master controller simplifies wireless device setup for the user.

In addition, the netFIELD IO-Link Wireless Bridge wirelessly connects a wide range of IO-Link-enabled sensors to the master. It requires only 24V power to wirelessly transmit data from IO-Link sensors or actuators and is IO-Link wireless compliant and bi-directional. In most cases, the device is supplied with power by default.