June 22, 2015 - The European Organization For Nuclear Research (CERN) will restart its Large Hadron Collider LHC after a renovation break of over two years. The 27-km particle accelerator will smash protons together at a speed that is close to the speed of light.
The Detector Control System (DCS), part of the LHS, uses more than 5000 CANopen nodes. They are connected to multiple networks, which are integrated into a Scada system. The link between the Scada layer and CANopen is realized by means of OPC UA.
The CANopen nodes are called ELMB (embedded local monitoring boards). The researchers use CAN interface boards from Kvaser (Sweden) and National Instruments (US) to connect the CANopen network segments to the central controller. The configurations of the OPC CANopen servers by Unified Automation (Germany) are stored in XML files.