First steps with Etherlab

Note: further details still missing (work in progress)

1. Take an arbitrary Desktop PC
2. Install Linux on it (OpenSuse or Linux Mint are some good recommendations)
3. Install build-essentials and git
4. get the sources from https://gitlab.com/etherlab.org/ethercat
5. compile and install the binaries and libraries
6. Take a Beckhoff EK1100 bus coupler with some I/O modules
7. run ethercat scan
8. copy the source code from ethercat/example to your projectfolder myproject
9. copy or include this code into your myproject.c
10. generate the device mappings with ethercat cstruct > mappings.c
11. compile and run ./myproject

Now you have your own EtherCAT Master running - probably doing nothing else than transferring useless data to and from your slaves.

Now with the master running and working with your hardware, you probably want to implement some realtime logics.

You can integrate pdserv into your master application, which provides a non-realtime interface into the realtime process. On the other side you can use either pdcom or the graphical Testmanager.

So far we have used

• IgH EtherCAT Master for realtime data exchange on the EtherCAT bus.
• PdCom to provide a network interface for HMI
• Etherlab Testmanager to build your own simple HMI