industrialNETworX

netX Community Day - a complete success

The 25th of March was really a great day. After my introduction about the ideas behind the netX Community we started our training sessions. More than 40 interesting users participating our presentation about netX open source protocol stacks, configuration and test tools. Also the explanations how a protocol stack can be ported to run under Windows CE instead of our real-time-kernel rcX get a lot of attention. Another lesson gave an overview about the whole family of netX controllers and the new netX 10 which will us arrive in the first week of April. A podium discussion moderate by Ronald Heinze the chief editor of the etz magazine shows different aspects of open source. Dr. Carsten Emde the chairman of the OSADL community convinced with detailed knowledge about the market success of Linux and explained the meaning of Open Source and its different license agreements. I mentioned that our license agreement might be not the pure doctrine of Open Source but it fits perfect to requirements of the automation industry. Herbert Köbel the software development leader of Leuze electronic and the first netX customer mentioned at the end it will help to improve the functionality and quality of the netX protocol stacks. Also Wolfgang Hopfes from Softing AG said that they are thinking about creating a community and this might be a right strategy to fulfil future requirements of her customers.

For us the Community Day was the first step to bring the netX Community to live. After a few weeks of hard work we were able to put the first protocol stacks on the community platform. We had to simplify the application interface of our protocol stacks that they can be easily used in different applications or other hardware platforms. Our existing interface has the great advantage that it is common between all our devices even if they have a real Dual-Port-Memory or shared memory area inside the netX. This takes a documentation of up to 250 pages and is a real hurdle if you want to use it in simple applications like digitals IOs or under other operating systems.

We have figured out a way that we can have our existing and the new interface alternatively on top of the same protocol stack. With this we are able to provide our existing customers the very well known interface and to our open source users a much more easy to use interface. We called it INX (from industrial Networx) interface and hope that it will be so accepted as the old Hilscher standard Dual-Port Memory interface.

If you have more questions please let us know by the FAQ forum.