What are the Industrial Media Convertors, and what do they do?

There are 3 different IMC units (Master, Repeater, and Slave).  With a combination of these units customers are able to re-use existing blue hose cabling as a part of a migration plan to newer Ethernet based solutions.

It is important to understand that these devices are not protocol convertors, but rather media convertors.  As such they are not converting Ethernet IP to AB Remote I/O or DH+ packets.  Instead the IMC alters the electrical signals of the ethernet packets and overlays them onto the blue hose network.  Then another IMC unit converts the ethernet signals back.

When using the IMCs with an Allen-Bradley Remote I/O network running at 57k6 or 115k2 it is possible to overlay the signals and run both Ethernet based communications and the Remote I/O communications simultaneously.  At this time it is not possible to do so with an AB Remote I/O Network running at 230k4 baud.

When using the IMCs in an application where a DH+ network is in use the AN-X2-AB-DHRIO gateway needs to be included into the design of this network.  This is necessary since DH+ is a token passing network, and as such it is not possible to overlay the EtherNet IP packets onto the DH+ packets.  The solution for this application is to isolate the Ethernet traffic onto the blue hose network between the IMCs, and then have the AN-X2-AB-DHRIO route the DH+ packets to the proper PLCs on the DH+ network.

Please note that only a single IMC Master device can be used on a blue hose network, and it can communicate with multiple IMC slave devices. 

IMC Slave devices are only able to communicate to the IMC Master device via the trunk network.  They are not able to directly communicate to another IMC Slave device.