I am looking for some information on ELAN protocol for Siemens analyzers and also some information on AK protocol for California Analytical Analyzers. Mainly I need a starting point to communicate with these devices for labview.

[cli248]

Hi Dave,

Thank you for sending the zip archive via Gmail. I have successfully received your email and the attachments.

Appreciate your offer for further guidance!

Best regards,

Chen

[SPengineer]

David, 

I'm an engineer working on fire research for the FAA. We recently got 4 Seimens Ultramat 23 gas analyzers, and have been having some issues reading the values over the analog outputs. I'd like to use the ELAN RS485 output to read the values from them, but I don't really know where to start as I'm fairly new to serial communication. Would you be able to send me a copy of the files you've been sharing? I believe that  they would help me a lot. 

I'm believe I have the units wired correctly (half duplex RS485, connected to a Perle SDG4 P serial device server and connected to my computer running labview as virtual COM ports), but I can't test them without having the right communication information. The serial device server is not showing any activity but I'm not sure if that is from having the unit wired incorrectly or not having the computer reading the values. I can share how I have the wiring connected if you'd be able to help with that as well. I'd appreciate any guidance you could provide.

[DavidBoyd]

SPengineer,

I replied via private message with my email address.  I'm sure we can get this to work.

Wow, four ULTRAMATs, that's a serious installation!

Likely no serial activity observed (yet), since the gas analyzers (by default) are set to answer-when-asked.  They can be made to broadcast their readings (and my LabVIEW code will accommodate this), which may be enough, but you lose some flexibility with interacting with them this way.  You can easily poll them for regular readings and thus retain the ability to send other commands too.

Dave

[SPengineer]

That's great! I've responded over email, thank you for getting back to me. 

And yes, it's a lot to deal with on our end. We do fire research so we have to take a lot of of gas concentration measurements. These units are actually replacing 4 Emerson/Rosemount units that ran into some issues, and I'm just working on getting them integrated into our data collection systems.