Anybus Wireless Bridge II – Ethernet Compatibility

Anybus Support
#1

I work for a company in the warehouse automation and distribution business. Basically, our application consists of a mobile cart that gets pushed around a warehouse to direct users where and what to get. On the cart we have our Ethernet controller which in-turn needs to talk to a server to drive the cart operation. Due to roaming and connectivity issues with the current bridge, we are looking for a different solution.

Reading through documentation I got the impression that it will work with Anybus access points well, but not all wireless access points/networks. Is this true? Or do you have a different product that would fit out application better?

Thanks,
Brian

#2

Hello,

I am not sure I completely follow your application here. Are you looking to use one of the Wireless bolts (AWB2000) or bridges (AWB3000) to act as a Access point on one of the carts or connect the Cart up to an existing Wireless Network? If it is the latter option is there one device on the cart that needs a connection to the wireless network or multiple? If there are multiple devices you need to be aware that a layer 3 bridge is made with the connection to the wireless network. One MAC connects to the AP with multiple IP addresses.

Deryck

#4

Thanks Deryck. I think we are going to look at the bolt to connect our controller to an existing WiFi network. One question I had about the bolt was regarding the AT command interface. Looking through the documentation for the bolt section “A.5 Adding single Ethernet note to WLAN” it states that if you enable Bridge Mode-Layer 2 cloned MAC only before checking if it connects to the WiFi, the configuration web interface would no longer be available. Does that statement still hold true for the AT commands through the Telnet or Raw TCP connections on the Ethernet port of the bolt? Also I just wanted to clarify my understanding that AT commands can be issued through the Ethernet interface, is that true?

Thanks,
Brian

#5

DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP! After the final steps of the configuration procedure the web
interface may no longer be accessible from the network without doing a factory reset.

Is this the note you are referring to? I will need to double check this . It is a new change in the recent firmeware, previous the Cloned IP address field was not available and the bolt would still respond to layer 3 requests that reached it.

Deryck

#6

Yes, that’s the step i’m talking about. What i’m really trying to determine is if our controller would be able to issue the AT commands to the bolt for configuration without having to have some physically factory reset the bolt if we were to get into that scenario.

Thanks,
Brian

#7

Will the controller be on the wifi side or the Wired side of the device?

#8

The controller will be on the wired side.

#9

Hello @brittner,

So the ewon will not respond to its IP address once this setting is set. To reach it you would need to do ethernet broadcasts with ethernet type 666, these could be directed to the Bolt’s original MAC address. Our HMS ipconfig tool uses this method to allow you to set the ip, you could take a network capture to see how this would work. You would use similar requests from your application but include the AT commands.

Deryck

#10

This is probably a armature question, but what yo you mean by “Ethernet Broadcast” and “ethernet type?” UDP/Port?

Brian

#11

Hi,

This is a good question to be honest im not sure myself. Here is a screen shot of showing the message in wireshark. You can see the MAC of my bolt is set as the destination and the data is the ASCII AT command asking for the IP address. The second shows IP config setting the IP address.

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EDIT:
Here is the capture it self.
IPconfig capture.pcapng (43.0 KB)

#12

OK, I think I can work with that for now. Thanks!