RT-FireWire

RT-FireWire is an OpenSource project, aimed at using FireWire as a hard real-time communication medium in industrial automation. It is based on Xenomai(an real-time extension to Linux).

Based on the IEEE1394 protocol, each FireWire node potentially hosts 48-bits wide address space, which gives a big room to let other high-level communication protocols stack on, e.g. CANopen, Real-Time Publish-Subscribe protocol, etc.

Via the implementation of real-time Ethernet-over-FireWire, an application-layer module emulating Ethernet interface over FireWire hardware, RT-FireWire enables RTnet, a hard real-time communication framework over Ethernet to work on Firewire.

One application of RT-FireWire is built by M. Omar Faruque Sarker and his colleagues in the Intelligent Robotics Research Center of Korea Institute of Science and Technology, where RT-FireWire is used as the network platform for their robot control. An IEEE paper can be found here.

The work of the RT-FireWire project was developed by Zhang Yuchen in his MSc assignment at Control Engineering Group, University of Twente, the Netherlands. Currently,he is also responsible to managing the RT-FireWire open source project and maintaining this website.