Balluff Inc. now offers its economical Micropulse AT Linear Position Transducer with the VARAN Bus interface. The Micropulse AT with VARAN Bus interface is able to track the location of up to four position-marker magnets. The transducer outputs a digital time value, which is used by the controller to calculate the position of each magnet using the transducer length and resolution. It is available in a non-contact, floating magnet configuration, with optional measuring ranges from 50 mm up to 1.5 m. The VARAN client chip is embedded into the transducer itself as a low-cost FPGA, allowing simple read/write configuration and making it an economical solution for linear positioning. VARAN Bus is a robust Ethernet-based industrial network protocol based on IEEE 802.3 100TX Standard Ethernet technology. VARAN Bus offers additional benefits over standard Ethernet including: Enhanced resistance against disruption; extremely high data integrity; fast bus speed operating in "hard real-time" with bus cycle times less than 100 μs; low jitter below 100 ns.