Rabbit® Puts Facilities Monitoring Within Easy Reach

CMC Industrial Electronics and Rabbit offer an easy, low-cost solution to monitor industrial facility.

Rabbit’s low-cost tools and simple licensing were key factors in the adoption of the Rabbit processor.

—Douglas Forst, CMC

Imagine trying to keep track of an entire manufacturing plant or the different mechanical systems in a building. There are plenty of tasks to keep a team busy throughout the day, and sometimes problems are missed that lead to delays, and ultimately cost the company time and money.

Traditional systems approached the problem by using a PC to directly interact with the sensors and other devices. The PC required special software to configure and collect data from the system. The PC was the only Human-Machine Interface (HMI) device, so users had to travel to the PC’s dedicated location to check on the system. CMC Industrial Electronics needed a streamlined solution that could configure and display a large network of sensors and would allow users to view monitoring data over the Internet using a PC at any location, without requiring additional software.

CMC developed the mOI215 Webserver with Rabbit’s RCM2250 RabbitCore®. The mOI215 provides a Modbus TCP/IP interface that allows data from up to 256 sensors to be managed and accessed over the Internet from any PC. This HMI system is comprised of a digital bus backbone to which all the sensors connect via a 1-Wire® connection. Sensor data is then converted to a Modbus RS-465 RTU network. The mOI215 also manages an extensive sensor alarm system including email alerts.

Douglas Forst, an engineer at CMC, cited the royalty-free stack and integrated development environment to be the deciding factors in choosing the RCM2250.

“We considered Motorola processors for this project but could not obtain affordable development tools for their products,” said Forst. “We were also concerned about the cost of ongoing licensing and administering a vendor’s complex licensing agreements. Rabbit’s low-cost tools and simple licensing were key factors in the adoption of the Rabbit processor.”

Forst found numerous benefits in using the Rabbit solution. CMC was able to develop a complex program with extensive TCP/IP requirements using low-cost tools. Having a complete module with memory and network components greatly simplified their design process. Their application depended heavily on the RCM2250 and its web server capability and other required features.

“The processor had the right mix of serial ports and available memory for our project. We would not have been nearly as successful at market without the high-end HMI display we developed using the Rabbit processor,” explained Forst. “We sell one web server for every 100 or so sensors. Without the web server application we would never have achieved the market potential we now have.”

CMC Industrial Electronics found the RabbitCore to be the easiest, most cost-effective solution for their embedded application needs. They were able to quickly implement a system that handled the demands of facilities monitoring and could share information across a network.

Forst said, “To date, reliability and software integrity have been excellent and we are very satisfied with the product. We would not have been able to embark on the project without Rabbit.”

For more information about CMC Industrial Electronics, please visit: http://www.cmciel.com/

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