Independently from the type of inter-winch connection (Ethernet or low-speed noise-immune G-net network) the server coordinates both internal and external processes, as well as provides an user interface and integrating capabilities (USB and RS-232 connection).

G-net

   G-net net­work can be built with ran­dom to­po­logy via a Cat 5 cable with 4 twis­ted pairs -- one for trans­mit­ting the data in RS-485, and the oth­er for a power device con­trol­ler(12V DC).

   Two chan­nels of a simple sym­met­ric­al mi­cro­phone cable can be used as seg­ments of the G-net net­work with the simple cable ad­aptors when ne­ces­sary (e.g., for con­nect­ing the con­trol pan­els on stage).

   The net­work can use long wires lines up to 1 km and more, giv­en the com­mon mont­age prin­ciples are obeyed. The pro­pri­et­ary net­work pro­tocol provides im­proved noise im­munity and self-test­ing fea­ture. The speed of the net­work is lowered to 19200 bit/sec which al­lows to en­sure more stable work in the noisy en­vir­on­ment. For con­veni­ence, each G-net device has 2 ports for a fast daisy chain con­nec­tion.

   All the devices in the net­works are equal in terms of their abil­ity to dir­ectly send the data to oth­er parts of the net­work. A ded­ic­ated net­work man­aging device provides spe­cial dis­patch­ing func­tions, such as search, log, work­load con­trol, tim­ing and net­work ID ser­vice. Ac­cord­ing to the TIA/EIA-485-A spe­cific­a­tion, G-net sup­ports up to 128 devices sim­ul­tan­eously con­nec­ted to the net­work. The guar­an­teed time of the re­ceiv­ing the mes­sage pack­age in the net­work of 32 devices is 0.3 sec (typ­ic­ally - 0.1 sec).

Ethernet

   If the cor­res­pond­ing op­tion is in­stalled, Miclift devices can use 10/100 Base-T Eth­er­net on a stand­ard Cat 5 cable net­work. This al­lows to cre­ate large con­fig­ur­a­tions, re­duce the com­mand re­sponse delays and eas­ily in­teg­rate winches and oth­er devices in­to tech­no­lo­gic­al net­works. The net­work to­po­logy is stand­ard for the TCP-IP pro­to­cols with con­ven­tion­al switches and routers. In the Eth­er­net con­fig­ur­a­tion, the serv­er be­comes a gate­way with two in­de­pend­ent 10-Mbit ports.

Software

   The soft­ware is based on a net­work dae­mon run on Linux OS on the com­pact plat­form sup­port­ing G-net and TCP-IP, as well as RS-232 in­ter­faces. The pro­gram dis­patches pack­ets of dif­fer­ent seg­ments, stores the set-ups and set­tings in­form­a­tion, as well as provides net­work co­her­ence and in­teg­ra­tion op­tions.

   The serv­er runs the web in­ter­face, al­low­ing the user to in­ter­act with the winches through any com­puter con­nec­ted to the sys­tem through Eth­er­net or WiFi with the stand­ard browser sup­port­ing Web­Sock­et tech­no­logy. It can be mod­i­fied for spe­cif­ic re­quire­ments just like any oth­er web­site. In­teg­ra­tion op­tions: stand­ard MQTT or low-level pro­pri­et­ary pro­tocol.