Ethernet/IP vs PROFINET: Automation Tech Talk for August 13, 2025

Let's talk about Ethernet/IP versus PROFINET in today's Automation Tech Talk, Lunchtime Edition: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Listen to Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog: Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you'd like to join the show sometime, don't hesitate to use the contact us link. Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated) Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Happy lunchtime. It is Shawn from Insights and Automation. I wanna welcome everybody who's tuning in. Thank you for joining me. Really wanna make these lunchtime sessions of the automation tech talk show, collaborative. So, please feel free to post questions or comments. For some reason, StreamYard has not taken those from LinkedIn, so my apologies. I don't know why. But in any case, maybe, if somebody could do a test post there, it says can't post comments to LinkedIn, so maybe I still can read them. Who knows? In any case, I hope you're having a great lunch. I'm giving myself thirty minutes to get ready for these things, and then, like, I was editing to this afternoon's podcast, and I'm like, oh, I gotta hurry up and get over here. But I put together a little, presentation just to talk about, you know, Ethernet IP versus PROFINET. Right? And so before we get into that, again, if you're having problems hearing me or anything like that, it looks like everything's working on my side. And and by the way, today, I'm coming to you from my office. It's not very clean, but this is where the work gets done when I'm not in the studio or in the training room. But in any case, so, let me put some things out there. So as somebody who's used Ethernet IP well since it came out. Right? So, you know, we were back in the days in Data Hour plus and remote IO, and some people call it Rio. And I was like, Rio is a city. Call it remote IO or r I o. But in the case, that's how my weird brain works. Hey. Thank you, Emmanuel. Really appreciate it. It's good to see you again. Great. It's been a while since we talked. So in any case, you know, one of the thing these vendors have done is made these things easy to implement in their products. And I gotta say, like all the major vendors I've used, they put that first in their thought process, at least from my perspective. And I can go into that programming software. I can add things on their network, and it works. So and there's a lot that goes on under the under the scenes behind the scenes in the software that makes that all work so well. I know with Ethan IP early on, we had the whole, you know, unicast with versus multicast. Everything was multicast. Some of you younger folks won't even know what I'm talking about, but we had to run around saying, use a use a switch with IGMP snooping. Use a switch with IGMP snooping. And then it was IG snooping and querying. And it's like, but in any case, that's all going away now with Unicast support. And, again, if you guys if I say something wrong, I'm just going off the cuff here. It's just lunchtime, so let me know. But, long story short, you know, I use both, both networks in the house here with just commercial switches. They run great. Of course, you wanna use industrial switches in an industrial environment. And I think most of you have the same the same experience with that. So, what I wanna do is kinda, like, take a look at them now. The one of the reasons I'm doing this today is I'm editing. I'm not quite done. It takes about three hours to edit these shows and publish them. But I'm just at the final steps of editing today's podcast, which will be on Profinet. And I thought, man, the this, this guy had some great slides, so I wanted to compare him to the slides I typically use for Ethan IP or at least one slide, which is, really based on a Rockwell slide that they were giving away for years and years and years. So without further ado, let's go ahead and take that look at that slide. And here you can see that it's not showing the right thing. It's supposed to be showing PowerPoint full screen. So let me fix that really quick. You know, I'm still getting used to let's see here. Share screen. Share window. Let's share the full screen window. I've yeah. I haven't used StreamYard in a few months, and they've changed it around quite a bit. So, yeah, that should be better. Here we go. Somebody's asking, hey. Before you go any further, can you explain unicast versus multicast? Yeah. Great question. Now it's not showing me your name, so I apologize. It's a StreamYard issue. But multicast, basically, you send them you put the your information on the wire, and then those people who want it can grab it. But what happens is and I know for some of you, you're probably rolling your eyes, Shawn, why are you talking about this stuff? But somebody asked about it. So in any case, what happened is for the switch to route those pack typically, our standard switch routes packets based on the IP address. Right? The MAC address. Right? So it makes a list of and I won't go into good gory details. Let me try to keep this verbiage very simple. The the switch typically for IP addresses, right, will keep a list of what MAC addresses on what, port. Okay? So it knows that PLC number one at one nine two one six eight one dot one is on port one and maybe a PLC number three on port three and it's dot three and so on. And so it can't do that it can't do that with multicast packets. You need INGP snooping. In other words, you can open the packet, see which INGP group it belongs to, and querying so it can ask people what group they belong to to be able to route those packets. So in essence, if you use that if you use the multicast with a standard switch, it's like turning that switch to a hub, and every message goes to every port. And we had a lot of people call up and say, hey. All my devices on my network has stopped stopped working because they've gone off hook because they're getting a lot of messages that don't belong to them. So I hope I did that justice. Unicast is now the message is sent just to the person who needs it. It's not broadcast to the whole network. There's ups and downs about that, but that's what I'm not what I'm here talking about. If you guys wanna see me talk about that in a future episode, I'd be happy to. If you guys think I made that too simple of a description, let me know that as well. So in any case, here we are in, back in PowerPoint, and this is your typical layers. Right? So you have your OSI as, seven layer network model, and this is actually comparing this is for common industrial protocol. So this is comparing, Ethernet IP, ControlNet, and DeviceNet. So you can see, you know, we have on the very lower end here down the the green area, we have the physical Sabrina's Ethernet. So we have the physical media, bits and bytes. We have data links, frames, MACs, LLC. We have packets, path, IP addresses. So all of this, you know, if we think about that OSI seven layer network model, that's that's nothing to do with Rockwell or Siemens. That's just part of network design. And then we have, of course, the application layer. This is can be split into in the OSI model, application presentation and session layers. With, Rockwell. We're just talking about the application layer. Okay. So I thought this is a very interesting, slide, that kinda shows you how you can do the, seamless bridging or routing between Ethernet IP, control net, and device net. You can go in and out one or the other. You don't have to do any, you know a matter of fact, we were kinda debating I should shouldn't say debating this, but, I was trying to give people some insight on this last month or two months ago on LinkedIn. It's like, look, When the 1756 ControlLogic stuff started coming out, we didn't have any POCs. And we were selling the racks with a data plus card and an Ethernet card so you could and it was a DHRO card. So you could seamlessly bridge between the two. And I don't know how many plants I've been to, even, like, metal stamping plants where they'll have one Ethernet card and a whole bunch of DHRIO cards so they could go Ethernet to all their their Data Highway pluses. And so not that Data Highway Plus supports CIP, but that kinda you know, when when you would do a control or a device that you could just go out Ethernet and go to those other devices and boom, everything worked. You didn't have to set up a router like a k f two or a k e card if any of you guys have used those. But in any case, and that's kind of what you see when you use your USB cable with a with a Compact or ControlLogix or with the network cards. Those were added to the network cards after a while. You get that seamless bridging and routing. So that is the Rockwell side of the fence. Okay? And I just thought, look at how similar it is to PROFINET. Now, again, different vendors, different formats of slides. And Tom from PI is gonna go through this in lots and lots more detail that I'm gonna cover here at lunch, when that releases, probably at 03:30 today if I finish it on time. I also am waiting for a trade show demo to show up for one of my, sponsors, so I may have to run out in the middle of the show and go let them in. But in any case, take a look at this. We have the same OSI seven layer, network, model. Right? And you can see all these are the same things. Right? This is all the same. But over here, now we have the PROFIDAT. You see how it lays right on top of that, you know, Ethernet. Right? And I just think it's so cool. This is what makes Ethernet so cool is that so you know, it's not a locked down network. It's an open network. Anybody can use it. Right? And so you can see they have their non real time data and their real time data. And in real time data, there's also time critical data. Right? And so you'll notice,...