hasna dahnini wrote:
I don’t want to use Ethereal as an USB analyser. I just want to get
Profibus signals through the USB port and analyse them on Ethereal.
OK, I don't know much about Profibus and Profinet, but I infer from what
others have said, and from the stuff on the
http://www.profibus.com/
site that Profibus is an industrial networking scheme that includes
specifications all the way to the physical link layer, while Profinet
runs on top of Ethernet. (The diagram on the page at
http://www.profibus.com/technology/docu.html
indicates that Profibus runs on top of RS-485 and IEC 1158-2 as physical
link layeer standards, and that some form of gatewaying is possible
between Profibus and Profinet.
I'll assume that by "Profibus signals" you're referring to Profibus, not
Profinet, i.e. that there's no Ethernet involved.
So:
And, I will decide on what format my signals will arrive on the USB port
because the Profibus signals will come from an hard system.
Is that clear ? Can I use Ethereal for this application ?
...there are (at least) two issues I see:
1) getting Profibus signals from some USB device;
2) decoding the resulting information.
1) is a problem that is mainly a non-Ethereal problem.
If you can solve 1) in a fashion that lets you, for example, read
Profibus signal information into a file, *and* that the file can be
broken into packets - i.e., that Profibus is a packet-oriented protocol,
and that you'll be analyzing packets rather than, for example, signal
waveforms (Ethereal isn't a waveform analyzer) - then the only part of
1) that would involve Ethereal would be writing code to read the file,
and then you'd write a dissector for Profibus that processes the data
you'd read from the file.
