piconet combines the rugged connectorized concept of TURCK’s AIM™ stations with the modular I/O concept of the BL20 and BL67 systems. piconet stations are IP 67 rated and designed to be mounted directly on the machine with no need for a separate enclosure. Like the BL (BL20, BL67) systems, piconet consists of a gateway with connected I/O modules, but instead of connecting the I/O to a fixed backplane, piconet uses a distributed fiber-optic ring to communicate between the gateway and I/O.

piconet stations are available as stand alone units for DeviceNet™, PROFIBUS ®-DP and CANopen systems; this section focuses on piconet subnetwork systems. Subnetwork systems offer a very flexible approach to connectorized I/O, while allowing individual stations to be mounted as close as possible to I/O devices.

Up to 255 extension modules may be connected to one gateway, with no more than 15 m of fiber-optic cable between each module.