If you have more than one pump, this article will show you what components you need to connect them together to your computer. It’s contains a shopping list of components to order from your pump supplier. There are two ‘levels’ of connection that you need to get setup.
  1. The physical cables connecting your computer and the pumps and
  2. The logical addressing of each pump on the network.

Pump Network Diagram

First thing is to get an over view of how the pumps and computer are physically connected together. This diagram shows you the parts you need to connect 1 or more pumps to your computer.

These parts are available from your pump distributor. They are:

Connecting The Cables

Pump rear panel

To Computer socket on the rear of a pump

The blue arrow in this picture shows where the two rs232 communications connections are made. RS232 connections go here – not the db9 connector. The D connector to the right is not used for communications – it is the digital input/output port. pumpnetworkconnectorstocomputerhighlightThere are two square holes in the black recess. The hole on the left (viewed from the rear of the pump) labeled To Network is the connection to the next pump in the network and the hole on the right is to connect to the computer or the next pump on the daisy chain closest (electrically) to the computer.

Cabling – First pump

Connect your computer’s COM port or the computer’s connected USB-RS232 adapter  to the ‘To Computer’ socket.

Cabling – Second and subsequent pumps.

Connect the network socket of the first pump to the computer socket of the second pump. Connect a new cable into the network socket and then to the next pump’s computer socket. Keep going till you have connected all of your pumps. The last pump should only have one cable in the computer socket.

Pump cabling diagram

Pump Addressing

Now you will need to think about pump addressing. Each pump has to be set to a unique address number (0 through 99) so that it can be differentiated from the others and so it knows which commands are intended for it. The easiest way to do that is to set each pump up individually. Every pump comes set to a factory default address 0 (zero) – so the easiest thing to do is to connect each pump individually to your computer as the only connected pump and set its address. When all pumps have been assigned an address, then they can be connected to the rest of the pump network. SyringePumpPro supports you assigning any address from 0-99, the pumps can be non sequentially addressed and you do not have to have a pump at address 0. The only thing you cannot do is have two pumps set to  the same address.   Network hookup

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