The main control unit can be connected together or to the host machine through a number of popular communication standards.

These include:

• RS-485 Bus
• CAN Bus
• Ethernet Bus
• FRnet

RS-485 Bus
The main control units, 8410/8411/8810/8811, are equipped with an RS485 communication interface capable of bandwidths up to a maximum of 921.6K BPS max. The connection medium is a twisted-pair, multi-drop 2-wire RS-485 network. The 8411 and 8811 are RS485 based controllers with 4 and 8 slots respectively. The 8410 and 8810 are slave expansion modules providing 4 or 8 slots respectively .

CAN (Controller Area Network) Bus
The main control units, 8420/8421/8820/8821, are designed for CAN bus applications. The DeviceNet and CanOpen protocol is supported. The 8420/8821 acts as a slave device and 8421/8821 acts as a master/slave device.

Ethernet Bus
The main control unit, 8431/8831, are designed for Internet/Ethernet applications. The 8431/8831 supports the TCP/IP, Web-Server & VxCOM library. The TCP/IP library provides a simple means to connect these modules directly to the Internet through the Ethernet controller. A built in Web-server library provides the means to directly link to a standard HTML browser, IE or Netscape. The Virtualized-COM library makes it ideal for Ethernet-to-RS-232-router applications.

FRnet
FRnet is an innovative industrial field bus that has many special features, such as high-speed deterministic I/O control, real I/O synchronization capabilities, non-protocol communication, and easy programming. Pluging a FRnet communication module (I-8172), the I-8000 MCU can link FRnet I/O modules to implement high speed distributed I/O.