Profibus DP slave design

[Gergo]

Does anybody have experience designing a slave device for Profibus DP network. Im especially curious on designs with intelligent ASICs, like SPC3, VPC3+. Its really hard to find a reference design anywhere.

 

[Harald Kapp]

The hard part is not the hardware, The SPC3 has a rather simple parallel interface with an 8 bit data bus and an 11 bit address bus plus a few control signals.
This manual shows a simple reference design using an 80C32 microcontroller.

You will have to invest a lot more work into the software part.

 

[Gergo]

You mean a lot of work, even if a firmware is provided by the manufacturer? Like as in the case of the VPC3+ Profichip profides a software stack written in C. To be honest I feel like I wanna go with VPC3+S with SPI interface and an STM32F103 uC . Without too much programming experience, Im not sure how much work is still required with a firmware.

 

[Harald Kapp]

Like as in the case of the VPC3+ Profichip profides a software stack written in C.

If you have a library from the manufacturer the workload will be immensely reduced, of course.