Company Beckhoff (www.beckhoff.de) offers an Ethernet Bus coupler that can be expanded with a lot of digital/analog IO modules http://www.beckhoff.de/english/busterm/bk9000.htm IMHO price is 236EUR + TAX + prices of IO-Modules
Wago (www.wago.com) offers a similar modular distributed IO system.
Advantech offers the ADAM6000 series of complete Ethernet-to-Digital-IO-Modules (approx. 180EUR + TAX) and Ethernet-to-Analog-IO-Modules http://www.advantech.com/products/sub_category.asp?Category_ID=1-LXK3G&PD=AD AM
IMHO both of them are working with Modbus over IP (don’t know TCP/UDP) Seems to be hard to modify their firmware...
Jan, maybe your institut can make a deal with Beckhoff/Wago/Advantech to make their equipment rtnet-ready? I would join that interesting 'subproject'!
:o) [big smiley!]
I could tell you some stories about talking to company representatives and asking for Linux and/or RTnet support for their products. And those who make a living of such porting work (Linux service providers) could actually tell you even more...
Basically, the companies are all very interested if such add-ons come for free ("Isn't it Open Source? Then why does it cost money to make it work?") and if they don't have to reveal too much internal information/code. They are all cooking with water, and they don't like others to watch that it is not always really cooking. ;)
Currently, it is still a bit too early to persuade larger vendors that RTnet support could be interesting for their customers and may help them to sell even more devices. Things may get easier if the company is smaller and sees such add-ons as distinguishing features for their products - that's why it may be worth contacting the Barix guys.
But time will come for RTnet, I'm sure. I just heard of a new interesting commercial request about RTnet today - if this comes to real, it will be another significant push for the project. We are always open for cooperations with automation equipment vendors, but it has to be giving AND taking. And when there will be a chance to hack RTnet in some IO module, I will surely let you know!
Jan
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