MagnaTran 7.1 User’s Manual
Operational Interfaces
MN-003-1600-00
Serial Communication SIO1
Brooks Automation
Revision 2.2
5-5
Serial Communication SIO1
Serial communication between the robot and a Host Controller is accomplished by
connecting the robot, via a 3 or 4 wire serial communications cable at port SIO1, to a
serial I/O port on the Host Controller.
Serial communications allows the Host Controller to communicate with the robot
using the commands detailed in
. The characters in each
command are converted to sets of binary bits (1’s and 0’s) and the bits for each char-
acter are transmitted down the wire in “single-file”. No additional control or “hand-
shaking” wires are used. The Baud Rate (see
) indicates the speed of the
connection in bits-per-second.
Serial port SIO1 is optically isolated. Serial and logic commons are tied together with
a resistive connection between the two grounds thereby preventing a charge building
up on the wires and causing a permanent failure. This isolation may be defeated by
removing the 1.2K resistor. See Wiring Diagram in
In situations where the Command Display Module and the Host Controller are
unavailable, a personal computer running a serial communications application may
be connected to the robot’s serial communication port using the same cable and com-
mands to communicate with the robot as the Host Controller.
The connection to the MagnaTran 7 Robot from the external controller uses selectable
RS-232 or RS-422 serial communications. The MagnaTran 7 robot is initially set to RS-
232. The configuration for the robot’s serial communications protocol for all serial
connectors is described in
