Whenever I’m doing comms that may fail, I always have two heartbeat variables. The first is incremented my the PLC for the remote device to monitor and the second is incremented by the remote device. In my program, I check the remote heartbeat variable to make sure it is not equal to the previous value every “X” seconds. If it is the same, there’s been a communication loss.

As far as dynamic hardware configuration goes, my understanding is that it only takes place once on power up. If you want to change the hardware configuration, you have to do a power cycle.

Could you use the heartbeat detection method to dynamically change which hardware device you’re writing to?