This week in review: Real time communication and safety.

Mon, 27 Jan 2020

TCP/IP protocol sucks if you want to do realtime communication. ▣

Wed, 29 Jan 2020

Black Channel vs White Channel concepts for safety are two ideas of how to implement a Safety system network.1 2 3

In a Black Channel system, you assume that your medium of communication is not safety rated and you perform additional checks at your application layer to ensure data reliability. In a system like this, we can use regular network hardware and treat it as a black box and perform error and data integrity checks on the application side. This is a much more cost effective option and it is the type of system a lot of safety system manufacturers use.

In a White Channel system, your entire system is safety rated, down to the last coupler. This makes it very hard to design and a lot more expensive.▣

  1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/002029400704001003 ↩

  2. https://www.controlglobal.com/articles/2011/hiddennetwork1102/ ↩

  3. https://ez.analog.com/b/engineerzone-spotlight/posts/functional-safety-and-networking ↩