General Electric IC697BEM731 Bus Expansion Modules

The IC66* Bus Controller (GBC/NBC) can be used as a single channel controller. It occupies one IC66* PLC slot. The Bus Controller is configurable through the MSDOS or Windows programming software configurator function. The IC66* input/output blocks are scanned asynchronously by the Bus Controller and the I/O data is transferred to the CPU through the IC697 PLC rack backplane after each scan.

The Bus Controller also supports directed communications initiated by a PLC CPU communication service request. In addition, it can be configured to perform global communications.

Faults reported by the Bus Controller are managed by the PLC Alarm Handler function, which timestamps the faults and queues them in a table.

For applications that require point-to-point information transfer, the bus controller can act as a communication node to connect other devices (bus controllers, PCIMs, and other IC66* devices) via the IC66* bus. Such a network can provide communications between multiple PLCs and a host computer.

These communications include the transfer of global data from one CPU to another. Global data areas are identified by the MS-DOS or Windows configuration. Once initialized, the specified data area is automatically and repeatedly transferred between devices.

Additionally, messages called datagrams can be transmitted based on a single command in ladder logic. Datagrams can be sent from one device to another on the network or broadcast to all devices on the bus. The IC66* LAN communications are supported by the IC69* PLC series.