[Embedlets-dev] Enterprise Outpost 'Wide fanout' pattern diagram

[Ted K. <tk...@ya...>]

I have been researching what it would take to leverage JXTA technology in our
Enterprise Outpost 'Wide fanout' pattern and here is a diagram I put together
which shows this:

http://tkosan.javadevices.org/misc/embeddedjava/wide_fanout_pattern.jpg


Earlier, Bruce had stressed that CAN was where a lot of the industrial
sensor/actuator market was heading and these two sites seem to confirm this
position:

http://www.canopen.us

http://www.odva.org


We had also had a significant amount of discussion on creating a multidrop
microcontroller network in order to interface to sensors and actuators but
after researching this issue again over the past few weeks it is my opinion
that our original 'wide fanout, protocol neutralizer' concept is the technology
that will be easiest to market initially.

For those newer people on the list, the 'wide fanout, protocol neutralizer'
concept consists of attaching existing industrial sensor/actuator networks to
backend enterprise systems in the most efficient way we could think of.  This
original concept is what is shown in the diagram.


Also, earlier we had talked about using SLIP as the base protocol for a
multidrop microcontroller network but SLIP is just a simple point-to-point
protocol which is not capable of addressing multiple endpoints.

If multiple endpoints need to be addressed then at least the equivalent of an
IP layer would need to be implemented on each microcontroller on the network.

The reason I am interested in this issue is that my vision for how I think an
Enterprise Outpost should work includes using a standardized 'intelligent'
serial bus for I/O expansion (either SPI or I2C).  If a network protocol could
be standardized for these expansion modules, and if their connector and
electrical interfaces were also standardized, then the expansion modules and
driver software could be used with almost any kind of Outpost implementation,
not just a TStik.

The 'intelligent' part of the bus indicates that since many of the the I/O
modules are microcontrollers, then the bus could be used as a multimaster
collaborative network which should be able to ease the processing burden on the
main controller.


Does anyone have any ideas on what kind of protocols would be good to use for
an intelligent expansion bus like this?


Ted

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