Remote monitoring and diagnosing of fieldbus systems - an embedded device way

Remote monitoring and diagnosing with embedded device can significantly reduce the cost incurred in the daily maintenances and technical support of fieldbus systems compared to that with PC and OPC server fulfilled computing network. This paper deals with how to implement such an embedded device with interfaces to mainstream fieldbus systems as well as wire/wireless Internet connectivity. The objective is to remotely configure server application to meet different diagnosing requirements with the limited computing resources of the device. Flexible clients such as browser, socket client or telnet client can be selected to access the corresponding server. As a gateway between the high speed fieldbus system and the low speed Internet with uncertainty, the device can either locally process the data obtained from fieldbus system or send them as raw depending on the available communication speed of the client/server. The proposed method is feasible with the increasing capability of low cost microcontroller.