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AS-I AS-INTERFACE OVERVIEW |
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AS-Interface – The Why and How of AS-i |
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How to implement AS-i quickly & effectively |
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Once you've made a decision to add AS-i connectivity you have a number of ways to proceed. The choices vary in time-to-market, supportability, resource requirements and price. |
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1. Use an off-the-shelf Serial Gateway |
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An off-the-shelf serial gateway is the least economical approach with the fastest time-to-market. To implement a serial gateway your product must support a common serial communication protocol such as Modbus, DF/1 or even dumb ASCII. Data from your product will transfer to the gateway at serial baud rates (1200-19200).
Other than time-to-market (typically a week or two), there are few real advantages to this approach and many negatives. Gateways require an additional footprint, they can be costly, they are generally overkill for a simple device and the gateway vendor appears as the AS-i device owner. This option is only attractive if you expect low volume requests for AS-i connectivity. |
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2. Use an AS-i PCB |
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If your device uses standard signals, an AS-i PCB that accepts your signals and places them on the bus is an alternative solution for quick time-to-market projects. Built to your exact footprint and I/O requirements a custom solution is relatively fast and requires almost none of your resources. Custom solutions offer you the latest in capabilities while giving you absolute control of your development, network presentation and implementation. This approach is great for medium volume applications (i.e. a few hundred units per year). Real Time Automation, Inc. supplies PCBs of this kind. The advantages to this approach are relative low cost and tightly system operation. Disadvantages include the cost of one-time tooling and NRE. |
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3. Do-It-Yourself |
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The most costly, lengthy and risky approach is to form an internal effort to build it yourself. While this is admittedly what you’d expect to hear from a company whose business is selling custom networking hardware and software, the facts still speak for themselves. Like most bus implementations there are nuances to the AS-i specification that are not readily discernable. For example, the specification provides some very ambiguous language describing how to pick the device ID. |
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