A gateway for multi-device communication between Mechatrolink-III and RS-485

The gateway plays an important role in networks with different communication protocols because it enables devices in these networks to communicate with each other. Designing a gateway for multiple-devices with one physical device helps us to reduce costs and take full advantage of the higher-speed communication protocol. The lack of realtime capacity is a problem in this design approach. In this paper, we propose a gateway between Mechatrolink-III and multi RS-485 that satisfies real-time condition and reuses monitoring software over the entire network. The concept of the proposed gateway is based on an advanced feature of the Mechatrolink-III protocol that supports multi-slave devices. The lower speed RS-485 protocol is used as a demonstration for transmitting and receiving the proposed gateway. The identification of each slave differs over the entire network. The Mechatrolink-III slaves and RS-485 slaves have the same point of view as the monitoring software.