Product Description:

The FC2001-0000 is a fieldbus master card manufactured by Beckhoff for the FC Lightbus Cards series. Installed in the host computer’s PCI slot, the board links the PC-based controller to a Lightbus optical fiber ring used in distributed automation. Its role is to handle cyclic telegram exchange so that digital and analog I/O points positioned across machinery can be sampled or driven within microseconds, enabling synchronized motion, process monitoring, and sequence control from a single industrial PC.

The card transmits telegrams at 2.5 Mbit/s, a fixed baud rate that matches Lightbus slave modules and supports constant cycle times independent of ring length. Host access to the process image uses dual-ported RAM with 4 kB of addressable space for fast, conflict-free exchanges, while transient data are buffered in 512 KB of onboard RAM. The board also carries 256 KB of Flash memory for onboard program storage. Connection to the computer is achieved through a 32-bit Plug and Play PCI bus interface that can be mapped to two selectable interrupt lines and draws only 5 V from the backplane. A single optical port serves as one Lightbus channel, and the card supports eight logical communication channels for separating process and diagnostic data. Each cyclic telegram carries a user data field of 50 bits, allowing compact transfers tailored to small sensor values.

At the field level, the single Lightbus channel can address up to 255 slave devices, each identified by a fixed station number. When all eight logical channels are used, this structure supports a theoretical maximum of 65280 digital I/O points per channel, making the board suitable for large machine lines. Error detection is supported by a Hamming distance of d = 3, which allows single-bit errors to be identified without retransmission overhead. Startup and continuous service are specified for ambient temperatures from 0 °C to +55 °C, so the board can be mounted directly in standard control cabinets without additional climate conditioning.