RPA Electronic Solutions

RPA has a long history of taking our custom I/O solutions and offering a variant as standard I/O product.  The HVIO family is a yet another good example.  RPA offers two different variants of the HVIO, one with RS-485 communications support (RS485HVIO) and another with on-board Ethernet (eHVIO).

The HVIO addresses high voltage and high current DC I/O requirements.  A single HVIO supports 48 or 96 ports of high-powered DC I/O, giving the user 2-3 times the density of more costly off-the-shelf solutions.  The 48 port version has outputs that can be individually configured as either a high side or low side driver.  The 96 port version is a higher density configuration that features low side I/O drivers for each output.

The high voltage and high current I/O drivers have a long list of features including incandescent and inductive load control, output-specific diagnostics and over temperature protection.  RPA even includes useful fault logic that senses potentially hazardous conditions such as over/under voltage and shorted load, to name a few.  These features combine to form a configurable I/O solution robust enough for use in even the most hostile application environments. 

The onboard 16-bit MCU gives the RS485HVIO the flexibility to be used in a multi-drop RS-485 network that is connected to a host computer.  The high performance RX62N MCU gives the eHVIO the connectivity to myriad embedded PC platforms.

The host S/W driver allows up to 32 RS485-HVIO cards on a single RS-485 network. The S/W protocol supports all I/O port features in a single ‘Read’ or ‘Write’ command. There is no need for the user to issue multiple 'Read' or 'Write' commands to access all the port features. For example, all 48 or 96 I/O ports can be set in any arbitrary pattern by executing a single instruction.  Only an onboard MCU can provide this type of control over the hardware and provide a higher level of S/W communications back to the host PC.

eHVIO	RS485HVIO