Let’s talk about Ethernet/IP versus PROFINET in today’s Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:

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Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Happy lunchtime. It is Shawn from Insights and Automation. I wanna welcome everybody who’s tuning in. Thank you for joining me.

Really wanna make these lunchtime sessions of the automation tech talk show, collaborative. So, please feel free to post questions or comments. For some reason, StreamYard has not taken those from LinkedIn, so my apologies. I don’t know why. But in any case, maybe, if somebody could do a test post there, it says can’t post comments to LinkedIn, so maybe I still can read them.

Who knows? In any case, I hope you’re having a great lunch. I’m giving myself thirty minutes to get ready for these things, and then, like, I was editing to this afternoon’s podcast, and I’m like, oh, I gotta hurry up and get over here. But I put together a little, presentation just to talk about, you know, Ethernet IP versus PROFINET. Right?

And so before we get into that, again, if you’re having problems hearing me or anything like that, it looks like everything’s working on my side. And and by the way, today, I’m coming to you from my office. It’s not very clean, but this is where the work gets done when I’m not in the studio or in the training room. But in any case, so, let me put some things out there. So as somebody who’s used Ethernet IP well since it came out.

Right? So, you know, we were back in the days in Data Hour plus and remote IO, and some people call it Rio. And I was like, Rio is a city. Call it remote IO or r I o. But in the case, that’s how my weird brain works.

Hey. Thank you, Emmanuel. Really appreciate it. It’s good to see you again. Great.

It’s been a while since we talked. So in any case, you know, one of the thing these vendors have done is made these things easy to implement in their products. And I gotta say, like all the major vendors I’ve used, they put that first in their thought process, at least from my perspective. And I can go into that programming software. I can add things on their network, and it works.

So and there’s a lot that goes on under the under the scenes behind the scenes in the software that makes that all work so well. I know with Ethan IP early on, we had the whole, you know, unicast with versus multicast. Everything was multicast. Some of you younger folks won’t even know what I’m talking about, but we had to run around saying, use a use a switch with IGMP snooping. Use a switch with IGMP snooping.

And then it was IG snooping and querying. And it’s like, but in any case, that’s all going away now with Unicast support. And, again, if you guys if I say something wrong, I’m just going off the cuff here. It’s just lunchtime, so let me know. But, long story short, you know, I use both, both networks in the house here with just commercial switches.

They run great. Of course, you wanna use industrial switches in an industrial environment. And I think most of you have the same the same experience with that. So, what I wanna do is kinda, like, take a look at them now. The one of the reasons I’m doing this today is I’m editing.

I’m not quite done. It takes about three hours to edit these shows and publish them. But I’m just at the final steps of editing today’s podcast, which will be on Profinet. And I thought, man, the this, this guy had some great slides, so I wanted to compare him to the slides I typically use for Ethan IP or at least one slide, which is, really based on a Rockwell slide that they were giving away for years and years and years. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and take that look at that slide.

And here you can see that it’s not showing the right thing. It’s supposed to be showing PowerPoint full screen. So let me fix that really quick. You know, I’m still getting used to let’s see here. Share screen.

Share window. Let’s share the full screen window. I’ve yeah. I haven’t used StreamYard in a few months, and they’ve changed it around quite a bit. So, yeah, that should be better.

Here we go. Somebody’s asking, hey. Before you go any further, can you explain unicast versus multicast? Yeah. Great question.

Now it’s not showing me your name, so I apologize. It’s a StreamYard issue. But multicast, basically, you send them you put the your information on the wire, and then those people who want it can grab it. But what happens is and I know for some of you, you’re probably rolling your eyes, Shawn, why are you talking about this stuff? But somebody asked about it.

So in any case, what happened is for the switch to route those pack typically, our standard switch routes packets based on the IP address. Right? The MAC address. Right? So it makes a list of and I won’t go into good gory details.

Let me try to keep this verbiage very simple. The the switch typically for IP addresses, right, will keep a list of what MAC addresses on what, port. Okay? So it knows that PLC number one at one nine two one six eight one dot one is on port one and maybe a PLC number three on port three and it’s dot three and so on. And so it can’t do that it can’t do that with multicast packets.

You need INGP snooping. In other words, you can open the packet, see which INGP group it belongs to, and querying so it can ask people what group they belong to to be able to route those packets. So in essence, if you use that if you use the multicast with a standard switch, it’s like turning that switch to a hub, and every message goes to every port. And we had a lot of people call up and say, hey. All my devices on my network has stopped stopped working because they’ve gone off hook because they’re getting a lot of messages that don’t belong to them.

So I hope I did that justice. Unicast is now the message is sent just to the person who needs it. It’s not broadcast to the whole network. There’s ups and downs about that, but that’s what I’m not what I’m here talking about. If you guys wanna see me talk about that in a future episode, I’d be happy to.

If you guys think I made that too simple of a description, let me know that as well. So in any case, here we are in, back in PowerPoint, and this is your typical layers. Right? So you have your OSI as, seven layer network model, and this is actually comparing this is for common industrial protocol. So this is comparing, Ethernet IP, ControlNet, and DeviceNet.

So you can see, you know, we have on the very lower end here down the the green area, we have the physical Sabrina’s Ethernet. So we have the physical media, bits and bytes. We have data links, frames, MACs, LLC. We have packets, path, IP addresses. So all of this, you know, if we think about that OSI seven layer network model, that’s that’s nothing to do with Rockwell or Siemens.

That’s just part of network design. And then we have, of course, the application layer. This is can be split into in the OSI model, application presentation and session layers. With, Rockwell. We’re just talking about the application layer.

Okay. So I thought this is a very interesting, slide, that kinda shows you how you can do the, seamless bridging or routing between Ethernet IP, control net, and device net. You can go in and out one or the other. You don’t have to do any, you know a matter of fact, we were kinda debating I should shouldn’t say debating this, but, I was trying to give people some insight on this last month or two months ago on LinkedIn. It’s like, look, When the 1756 ControlLogic stuff started coming out, we didn’t have any POCs.

And we were selling the racks with a data plus card and an Ethernet card so you could and it was a DHRO card. So you could seamlessly bridge between the two. And I don’t know how many plants I’ve been to, even, like, metal stamping plants where they’ll have one Ethernet card and a whole bunch of DHRIO cards so they could go Ethernet to all their their Data Highway pluses. And so not that Data Highway Plus supports CIP, but that kinda you know, when when you would do a control or a device that you could just go out Ethernet and go to those other devices and boom, everything worked. You didn’t have to set up a router like a k f two or a k e card if any of you guys have used those.

But in any case, and that’s kind of what you see when you use your USB cable with a with a Compact or ControlLogix or with the network cards. Those were added to the network cards after a while. You get that seamless bridging and routing. So that is the Rockwell side of the fence. Okay?

And I just thought, look at how similar it is to PROFINET. Now, again, different vendors, different formats of slides. And Tom from PI is gonna go through this in lots and lots more detail that I’m gonna cover here at lunch, when that releases, probably at 03:30 today if I finish it on time. I also am waiting for a trade show demo to show up for one of my, sponsors, so I may have to run out in the middle of the show and go let them in. But in any case, take a look at this.

We have the same OSI seven layer, network, model. Right? And you can see all these are the same things. Right? This is all the same.

But over here, now we have the PROFIDAT. You see how it lays right on top of that, you know, Ethernet. Right? And I just think it’s so cool. This is what makes Ethernet so cool is that so you know, it’s not a locked down network.

It’s an open network. Anybody can use it. Right? And so you can see they have their non real time data and their real time data. And in real time data, there’s also time critical data.

Right? And so you’ll notice, right, and and I’m not gonna go into this in great detail, but, you’ll notice, right, that, you know, time goes through this. What’s non real time? Anything a hundred milliseconds or unscheduled, real time, one to ten milliseconds. This is this is the PROFINET view, And then time critical, less than a millisecond.

Right? You see motion control. And in the Rockwell world, we often would talk about SIP sync, SIP motion, all these different pieces of SIP again. I’ll repeat what I said yesterday. I invited the Ethernet IP people on, and they said, we don’t like you.

So, well, that’s showing the conversation a little bit. But in any case, now I’m I’m joking about that they don’t like you. It’s like they just didn’t see value in coming on the show. So, and and I said, fine. We won’t have you.

In any case, there you know, there’s all these things in the SIP protocol that talks about that. Now if you look over here, though, what I thought was very interesting in here so I’ve always told my students, you know, there’s RT, real time communications, and then there’s IRT. Right? And IRT, you’re not gonna find in those old, I shouldn’t say old, Gen one s seven twelve hundreds, at least if I’m remembering my the the lessons I teach my students. So, that’s one of the reasons why you wanna go to an s seven fifteen hundred.

You get a lot of IRT connections. Right? And depending on the model you get, you know, very similar to what you’re here with Rockwell, you get so many connections. And they have different names for it, but in any case, I I go over those charts in my course, s seven course. But, you know, time critical.

This is important. And then he actually talked about TSN as well, and I know Siemens is doing a lot. I don’t know if Rock was doing anything with TSN. But time sensitive networks really is kinda maybe the next generation. Maybe that’s one way of talking about real time data.

It’s it’s a new spec that’s designed to allow you to go well into the future with, you know, high speed communications. And I just think it’s so interesting. I know the folks in Mitsubishi and a lot of people in the Asia a lot of Asia manufacturers have jumped on that quickly. You see the, I I what is it? IE Link TSN, you see that advertised a lot.

Right? And, you know, we haven’t had Mitsubishi on this show probably in ten years, but I would love to get him back on, maybe seven years. So, always been a big fan of their what they do. But in any case, so from there, I wanted to show you this chart too. Again, Tom’s gonna go through this in gory detail, but I thought it would be something fun to talk about because, of course, he doesn’t relate it to Rockwell.

So I thought it would be fun to talk about and show you some of his slides, give you a little glimpse of what’s coming on coming out at 03:30. I think the podcast is about forty five minutes. He also has a bunch of free one hands on lessons, hands on training dates coming up, all around the country, so you guys may be interested in that. And so, you can see here real time PROFINET IRT and TSN all compared. Right?

And so very, very interesting. And and, the I’d from my understanding too is because PROFINET over TSN will be able to use off the shelf chips, then it’s gonna, make a lot more products capable of doing PROFINET over TSN, which will give you the the speeds faster than IRT. Right? You know? So very interesting stuff.

And let me go back to the comments. I don’t have any new comments there. So that’s what I wanted to talk today at lunchtime. I wanted to get you guys thoughts and opinions on that, but I thought it was really interesting comparing PROFINET to, you know, if we look at this slide and then comparing it to, Ethernet IP. It just we’re we live in such a great day and age where we’re using something open like Ethernet for everything.

And every you know, back when I get started back in 1990, it cost probably I’m gonna guess here because I didn’t look it up. $2, $2,000 to add a network card, like a DataWay plus network card DataWay plus network card to your computer. Right? And, you know, now every computer has even a built in, so it’s like, yeah. That’s awesome.

So So that’s what I have for you today. Let’s talk about what else is going on. I do have, a new, episode of the Automation Museum Show. So we’re still only about 7% in that fundraiser. And, again, there’s no rush.

I mean, this is something I wanna do. I wanna I wanna preserve the history of automation, industrial automation. So we also are recording our first Automation Museum podcast this weekend because this is all nonprofit, so we’re doing it on the weekend. I’m interviewing me and Jeremy are interviewing a person who actually wrote a book on the history of Wonderware and, Triconics, I believe, if I got that right. So, things I’m not that familiar although I’m very familiar with Wonderware.

I’ve used it a little bit, but so many of you guys out there over the years have shown me your your awesome InTouch projects. But in any case, this is gonna be a lot of fun. And then in two weeks after that, we’ll have another episode where I interview where we interviewed Jeremy about, you know, his thoughts of the evolution of Rockwell POCs starting at the 1774. So and we’re doing this totally to try to get this nonprofit up and running. You guys have sent me a lot of equipment over the years that I wanna give on your behalf to the Automation Museum, and we wanna preserve that knowledge like the PCMK card.

I have such vivid memories of helping people get their PCMK cards up and running. Right? And, it came to a point now this is back in the days of DOS. Okay? And if you never used DOS, then don’t start now.

So any case, we used to have to worry about TSRs and memory management and, you know, we get so frustrated because everybody wanted that mouse utility, that palm pilot utility. They had, like, PC tools. They wanted, like, 14 utilities running in the same, you know, 600 k of memory or whatever it was. Right? And, eventually, I just started hitting on boot disk because I’m like, dude.

They’re like, how come you didn’t get every all of my 28 software packages running on boot? I’m like, look. It’s just, you know, physics. Right? It’s there’s no way to cram those in.

So boot off this disk and have a have a nice day. But, yeah, good good memories and then Windows 95 and all that too. So, that’s what the automation museum is all about. Thank you to everybody who’s already given over at the automationmuseum.org, which sends you to give Send Go. And, thank you for everybody who sent in the hardware.

I’m gonna try to cover those every couple of weeks, the stuff that’s come in just as to help with the fundraiser to raise the the money. We the first thing we gotta do is get the the nonprofit set up. The, what else do we have? So we have the podcast coming out today, PROFINET. Next week, I think I don’t know if I can pull this off, but I’m thinking next week might be IO Link.

So I would love to do that next week. I have a trade show demo coming in from a vendor so I can cover their products. Very cool. What else do we got coming up? If you’re in my courses at the automation school, yeah, I should mention this.

Updates a lot of updates coming out. If you are have been holding off purchasing something, I looked at my, P and L profit and loss, and I gotta raise prices. I it kills me to do this, but if I don’t, the company’s gonna run negative. So instead of closing down shop because I don’t wanna raise prices, I gotta raise prices to match the prices I’m being charged. So, again, I took a big hit taking this job, but, I’m doing it because I love you guys, and I wanna make sure I can share all my knowledge with you.

So in any case, if you if you’re looking at a course at the automation school or a bundle on upgrade, if you do it before the December, you’ll get the 2020 prices. Otherwise, you’ll get the 2025 prices. And, you know, like we talked yesterday, POCs that were two fifty ten days ago are now 400, and that’s just life. You know? And it stinks, but in any case, doesn’t affect anybody who has, of course.

You’re getting new lessons too. I’m putting new lessons in. I got five new lessons I hope to release today. I’m just finished editing the last one, but I gotta do the pod today’s podcast first. And there’s so much other stuff going on here.

You know, I’ll try to think of more things for tomorrow’s show. I haven’t eaten my lunch yet, so we’re coming up on that twenty minute mark. So I just wanna thank you all for tuning in. If you wanna come on the show and chat with me during lunchtime for twenty or thirty minutes, let me know. Get in contact with me, LinkedIn, YouTube, any way you can, automationblog.com.

I’m also trying to publish these with a really nice so I paid for the extra service to get really nice transcripts. So if you’re a morning person and you’re like, I don’t wanna listen to somebody. I just wanna read because that’s me every morning. I won’t do anything any video because in the morning, I’m like, I want more like, I don’t wanna I just wanna read. So I’m signed to post the transcripts over there.

It cost me a little extra money, but, for those morning people who wanna read read the show and not watch the show, that you’ll find that at the automation blog as well. Much better transcripts, I think, than what you get from, like, a YouTube because they give you, like, time stamp in one sentence time stamp sentence. And this is more like it does not that it’s perfect, but it does a better job, I think. And with that, I’m just gonna wish you guys an awesome lunch. I’m gonna go eat mine.

I wanna wish you all good health and happiness, and until next time, my friends. Peace.

If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

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Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.