Does EtherCAT Supported in LinuxCNC

Dear All,

Does Linuxcnc controller supports EtherCAT communication protocol in the MESA 7i96s motion controller card ?

i have no idea about mesa or ethercat, but i think not.
however, it is probably possible to use ethercad directly without mesa

You're mixing topics here.

The Mesa 7i96s is an Ethernet device, intended for talking to traditional step/dir stepper or servo drives. IIRC, Mesa's driver talks to them using UDP packets on top of Ethernet, using IP.

EtherCAT *also* sits on top of Ethernet, but it's a very different protocol and doesn't use IP at all. Our implementation has a Linux kernel module that handles EtherCAT communication and gets very low latency and jitter relative to what can usually be accomplished by talking to devices over TCP or UDP, although the EtherCAT people are probably over-hyping its benefits somewhat, at least as far as LinuxCNC's needs are concerned. It seems to be a reasonably nice, mostly self-describing protocol for controlling industrial equipment.

So: to answer the questions that I *think* you were asking:

1. LinuxCNC supports the Mesa 7i96s over Ethernet using Mesa-specific drivers that are a core part of LinuxCNC.
2. LinuxCNC supports many EtherCAT devices ([/url] around 400 at last count ) using an optional add-on component .
3. Mesa boards don't use EtherCAT.