EtherCAT is an open, high performance Ethernet-based fieldbus system. The development goal of EtherCAT was to apply Ethernet to automation applications which require short data update times (also called cycle times) with low communication jitter (for synchronization purposes) and low hardware costs. The EtherCAT protocol is optimised for process data and is transported directly within the standard IEEE 802.3 Ethernet frame using Ethertype 0x88a4. It may consist of several sub-datagrams, each serving a particular memory area of the logical process images that can be up to 4 gigabytes in size. The data sequence is independent of the physical order of the nodes in the network; addressing can be in any order. Broadcast, multicast and communication between slaves are possible. If IP routing is required, the EtherCAT protocol can be inserted into UDP/IP or TCP/IP datagrams. This also enables any control with Ethernet protocol stack to address EtherCAT systems.
EtherLAB developed an EtherCAT master software that runs as a Linux kernel module. As a result, it is far faster than user-space implementation. However, building the Ethercat Master implementation with a Linux kernel requires to build it using the appropriate kernel version. As we build it with PREEMPT-RT, we shall have the appropriate version for the kernel, the PREEMPT-RT patch and Etherlab. It seems that the 2.6.33 release of the kernel meet these requirements.
Die IEC 61800-7 ist eine internationale Norm für eine universelle Schnittstelle für einen Antrieb mit variabler Drehzahl mit dem Titel "Generic interface and use of profiles for power drive systems". Sie wird von der International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) herausgegeben. In der Norm wird diese abstrakte, universelle Schnittstelle auf vier unterschiedliche Antriebsprofile abgebildet und diese werden wiederum auf unterschiedliche Kommunikationsprofile von Feldbussen undindustriellem Ethernet abgebildet.
WinPcap is a very useful tool which can enables users to capture windows packets. On their website they offer a development pack but only for C/C++ programmers. So this is why I decided to write my own (simple) class for capturing packets in C# importing the wpcap.dll . Before showing the code, you must know that in order for your program to run as it should in Windows Vista/7 you must run it as administrator, otherwise it won’t even find the (network) devices.
List of assigned and valid EtherCAT Vendor IDs sorted by Vendor ID.
This page was last updated on July 2, 2014.
Vendor ID ETG Member Department Predecessor Department
0x00000001 EtherCAT Technology Group (used for examples in documentation)
0x00000002 Beckhoff Automation GmbH Product Management
This driver tries to provide an easy-to-expand framework for the connection of LinuxCNC to EtherCAT devices. Some of the often used Beckhoff devices like digital and analog I/O, encoder input and pulse train output are already supported just as the [Stöber] MDS5000 series of servo drives. The driver is based on [IgH's EtherCAT master] and builds a glue layer like the etherlab component. It consists of an userspace component for configuration and a RT HAL module for the data processing.
The config module reads in and parses a xml config file and provides a prepared form of configuration data via shared memory to the RT part. The RT module is organised in a global part that is common to all submodules and a .c and .h file for each supported (class off) hardware device.
Since this driver is sill under development you can find the code [here]. Feel free to test or review the code and send me suggestions and hints. There is a discussion thread about this driver in the [forum].
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