CANopen Master or Slave for Ethernet/IP to CANopen

Hello,
I am working on a project to connect an AB PLC to a microcontroller via Ethernet/IP to CANopen and I am hoping to use an Anybus X Gateway. The microcontroller will be a CANopen SDO server, and the client PLC must be able to initialize SDO communication. Based on my research, a CANopen slave gateway will be unable to initialize SDO communication, and a CANopen Master gateway does not support SDO messaging (only PDO). Am I understanding this correctly? Are there any other options for a Ethernet/IP to CANopen gateway that supports SDO communication initialization?
Thank you for your help!

Greetings,
Are there any Anybus Gateways capable of connecting between Ethernet/IP master and a CANopen SDO server? The PLC (connected to Ethernet/IP side of gateway) needs to function as a SDO client, initiating SDO communication to the SDO server (connected to the CANopen side of gateway). If I understand correctly, the Anybus X gateway CANopen master does not support SDO communication. And the Anybus X gateway CANopen slave is unable initiate SDO communication to a server. Therefore, the X gateway would not work. Am I understanding the CANopen X gateways correctly? Are there any other products that would work for me?
Thank you for your help

Hello @sam1,

I am reaching out to our application engineer regarding this. It might be disposable to use our CAN communicator but I want to see if this is something he has seen done recently.

Deryck

Thank you for the response. Sorry for the double post! I wasn’t sure if I posted correctly the first time. From what I can tell, the CAN communicator supports individual CAN frames, but is not configured to run the higher level CANopen protocol. Maybe it is possible to create the CANopen protocol by sending the correct individual CAN frames from the PLC, but that sounds difficult. Looking forward to hearing what your application engineer thinks.
Thanks for your help.

Hi @sam1,

This is exactly what I am thinking i have seen customer set the CAN communicator up for CANopen but as you said it involves creating the can frames yourself. Which would require you to understand the CANopen enough to create the frames. I know I have seen it done before but I am not sure if they did it with PDOs or SDOs.

Deryck

Thanks for your help Deryck. I will keep researching CANopen to determine if it is feasible to create the individual frames needed. I will definitely keep the Anybus CAN Communicator in mind.
Thanks again.