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Redundancy Controller
Page
39
Document Number: 90-005-0030_E
Wavestream Modified SAbus
SAbus data format supports industry's standard asynchronous ASCII format as shown in the
comparison to the Wavestream modified SAbus protocol below.
Industry standard SAbus protocol
Wavestream SAbus Protocol
Asynchronous ASCII
Asynchronous ASCII
Start bits
1
1
Data bits
8 (7-bit ASCII with 8
th
bit set to even parity)
8 (no parity bit)
Stop bits
1
1
Data Format
The ASCII control character subset 00-1F (hex) are used for address, command, and data characters.
The standard bus data rate via direct connect (up to 4000 feet) is 9600 baud; the data rate for devices
connected to a master via modem is 1200 baud.
Message format and protocol over the SAbus is a derivative of IBM's binary synchronous
communications protocol (BISYNC).
The master station sends a command over the bus to all remote stations.
The station whose address is contained in the second byte of the command message
carries out the requested commands and then sends a response message containing its
own address and status information relating to its present condition.
A remote station only sends a response following a command from the master containing
its unique address. This prevents bus contention caused by more than one remote device
communicating over the SAbus at the same time.
A remote device ignores all commands that contain parity or checksum errors, protocol
errors, a wrong address, or message overrun errors.
A remote device replies with a not-acknowledged (NAK) character if it receives an invalid
command or data.
Message Format
Command messages begin with a start-of-text (STX) byte followed by a remote address, a command
byte, and multiple data bytes. The end-of-text (ETX) byte is sent following the last data byte and the
message is terminated by a checksum character.
STX
ADDRESS
COMM AND
D1
D2
Dn
Dn+ 1
ETX
CHKSUM
COMM AND MESSAGE:
ACK
ADDRESS
COMM AND
D1
D
Dn
Dn+ 1
ETX
CHKSUM
RESPONSE MESSAGE: COMMAND ACKNOWLEDGED
NAK
ADDRESS
COMM AND
ETX
CHKSUM
RESPONSE MESSAGE: COMM AND NOT ACKNOWLEDGED-UNABLE
TO EXECUTE OR INCORRECT COMMAND
NSG 380 A