Versamax Quality

[rammin48]

Just a quick question to see if anyone uses Versamax hardware and or I/O. We have been experiencing high fail rates to the serial port in Modbus applications on the IC200CPUE05. Has anyone seen or experienced similar problems? Thanks for the input

[RussB]

I do not have a lot of these but we have not seen any failures yet. This CPU has two serial ports plus ethernet that can be used for Modbus communications, which are you using and how? For short distances the RS-232 can work but then all devices need to be powerd from the same source, or properly isolated. The RS-485 will be more noise immune but you still should isolate the comm lines if the devices are powerd from different sources.

[rammin48]

I have several hundred of these out in the field using the rs485 port 2. We are seeing 24.5% fail rate in the field. In house fail rate is higher as they seem to not be immune to anything. We built our standard product offering around this and our now rethinking this. Anyone else have input?

[rammin48]

Just an update. After several months and fighting with GE I have some resolution. Versamax comm ports are not isolated. They have now recommended a port isolator be used in our application. It seems that the chip set in the versamax only accepts up to 5.5vdc where as the 9030 will accept up to 7vdc. That is why in some applications we were losing the versamax and not the 9030. Due to our application's where we have no control over the customer's grounding between devices and equipment we are looking to move to a totally isolated port solution such as the Pacs system. If GE hadn't tried to blame us and our equipment for this I might have solved this along time ago. It took us threatening to stop using GE products to ge their attention.