IL2302-B110-0000 by Beckhoff

The IL2302-B110-0000 is an I/O coupler box produced by Beckhoff within the IL Coupler Box Units series. It serves as a compact EtherCAT node that links machine-mounted sensors and actuators to a higher-level controller, allowing decentralized I/O to be installed directly on the equipment frame without control-cabinet wiring. On the process side, the device offers four digital inputs and four digital outputs, and it can supervise as many as 624 remote digital input channels and an equal number of remote digital output channels when additional terminals are stacked downstream.

This unit communicates over EtherCAT at a data rate of 100 Mbaud, and the signal is carried over a 4 × 2 twisted-pair copper Cat 5 cable so standard industrial Ethernet leads can be used. Two fieldbus trunks are provided through 2 × M12 D-coded sockets, enabling a daisy-chain topology while maintaining ingress protection up to IP65/66/67. The coupler operates in EtherCAT Direct Mode, and its hardware-based protocol processing forwards I/O data with microsecond-level delay. Remote extension segments can span up to 100 m between modules, providing routing flexibility in large conveyor or packaging lines. All local sensors and actuators connect through sealed M12 bolted ports, and the housing tolerates washdown cleaning procedures commonly used in food or chemical plants.

For analog processing, expansion capacity reaches 128 input points and 128 output points, all mapped through the same cyclic fieldbus frames. The internal power feed permits a maximum control current of 0.5 A to operate sensors, indicator lamps, or other low-power loads connected to the local output pins. Up to 512 bytes of input data and the same amount of output data can be exchanged during each EtherCAT cycle. This capacity allows the full peripheral count to be transported deterministically without fragmenting the process image.