Industrial Engineer · phase 5 of 16
PROFIBUS
Industrial fieldbus maintained by PROFIBUS and PROFINET International for controller and field-device communication.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- PROFIBUS is the serial fieldbus that came before PROFINET. It runs on a shielded twisted pair with purple jackets, at speeds that trade off against cable length.
- Example
- A 2010 vintage line has a Siemens controller polling drives and remote I/O over a single PROFIBUS DP segment, with termination switched on at both ends.
- Why it matters
- Millions of nodes are still running on it, and most faults come from termination, cable length or a bad connector rather than from any device. Knowing the rules for a segment is the difference between a five minute fix and a day of swapping parts.
- Hook
- The purple cable that refuses to retire.
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 5: PLC Industrial Communications
The protocols that let controllers, drives and operator panels talk, plus the addressing and description files that make them agree on what was said.
