The competition – launched by the Presidium of the Szeged Academic Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Bács-Kiskun, Békés, and Csongrád-Csanád counties, as well as the South Great Plain Regional Innovation Agency Public Benefit Association – aimed to recognize the most significant intellectual achievements in the region, as well as the products, processes, or services based on them. The criteria specified that the innovations should be applicable and marketable in the industry and should demonstrably represent a novelty in their fields.
“My competition entry was titled ‘PROFINET gateway module for integration into printed circuit boards (PCBs)’. The communication module I developed and named ProfiStack enables the integration of PROFINET – the leading industrial network protocol – into electronic products manufactured by small and medium-sized enterprises, or even individuals. Due to the complexity of communication, this data transmission capability has been so far primarily available in mass-produced products from large corporations,” said Konrád Törőcsik, who won a special prize in the same competition four years ago for another project.
According to him, due to the complexity of industrial equipment, it is no longer sufficient to focus solely on the specific functions of individual components – such as measurement or control – during the development or commissioning process. Equal, if not greater, emphasis should be placed on integration – that is, on how the individual components communicate with one another.
Within a given industrial system, there are numerous solutions for communication between components, but the Ethernet-based PROFINET stands out due to being fast and relatively easy to maintain. Therefore, this communication capability is now an expectation for products in many settings. At the same time, from the product development perspective, its implementation is complex and requires specialized expertise. For this reason, until now the development of PROFINET-compatible devices has been the privilege of large enterprises only. For developers of products manufactured in smaller quantities – such as a research institute’s measuring devices designed to meet specific needs – it has not been cost-effective to engage in this process. ProfiStack offers a solution to this problem, enabling any electronic device to be made PROFINET-compatible quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. According to our electrical engineer, his award-winning product bridges the gap between microcontroller-based embedded systems and industrial PLC networks.
“The device is a coated PCB with connectors on both sides. It works simply: the input side has an SPI bus, and the output side has PROFINET capability,” he said, holding the seemingly simple, palm-sized device in his hand. He revealed that the idea for developing ProfiStack had arisen in connection with his work at a research institute.
In fact, the PCB only seems to be simple; our colleague devoted many hours of work to the construction of this special circuit. A so-called Eval-board (a circuit board for testing) is also available for this communication device, allowing anyone to test ProfiStack’s functionality using an Arduino – an easy-to-use development board that is also popular in educational settings. Potential users include small and medium-sized businesses, but educational and individual projects can also achieve PROFINET compatibility using ProfiStack.
According to our electrical engineer, integration plays an increasingly important role even in the world of research equipment manufactured as single units or in small quantities. ProfiStack, which is suitable for mass production, makes it possible to connect custom-developed laboratory and measurement instruments – such as ELI ALPS’ equipment – to industrial systems.