PROFINET is an automation concept for implementing modular, distributed applications. PROFINET allows you to create automation solutions, which are familiar to you from PROFIBUS. The engineering tool for the PROFINET Driver may be Siemens TIA Portal, PNConfigLib or a non-Siemens tool that is able to use the open engineering interface described in this manual.
In TIA Portal, PROFINET Driver can be used without a license. In other words, you may install TIA Portal on your PC and continue using it to create PN Driver projects as long as you want, even after the trial license period of TIA Portal has expired. Please note that in this case, you can only use devices in your projects which can also be used without a license, e. g. GSDML based IO devices.
A good knowledge of PROFINET IO is required to use the PROFINET Driver.
The consistency of the configuration must be checked by the engineering system. The engineering interface of the PROFINET Driver assumes that the information and structure of engineering data are valid.
Engineering data are passed to the PNIO controller in XML format in a single file. The XML file contains the information required for configuring the PROFINET IO controller.
The content of the file will be passed to the function SERV_CP_Startup()
as byte array. For SERV_CP_startup(), refer to manual "IO-Base user
programming interface".
Content and target audience of this interface description
This document is intended for developers of PROFINET IO controllers. It contains:
- Overview of the XML structure of the engineering interface of the PROFINET Driver
- Description of the contained PNIO classes, attributes and links
- Description of the used data types and contained PNIO data blocks
This documentation does not include:
- Overview of PROFINET
- Description of the PROFINET protocol
- Detailed description of the PROFINET IO stack structure and processes