EasyCAT Arduino shield

zmrdko wrote:

Hello,
I have acquired EasyCAT shield for Arduino. It's working pretty well and very customizable.



 

HI
I confirm the versatility of EasyCAT, I built  this pendant in EtherCAT for LinuxCNC
with EasyCAT and an ItsyBitsy M0, less bulky than an Arduino and with the pins needed.

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

Any idea if this could be made to work with a Teensy 4.1? It has a 10/100 ethernet port and it only requires a magjack to use it. There's not many posts on that forum about ethercat so I have no idea how that works.

I've been messing with Arduino-Connector in my own project using a custom PCB but I've run into issues with the way that project is setup. There's some issue with a delay on the serial comms on the Python side. I just noticed he has a V2 branch and it looks like they're completely rewriting it so I don't know what the story is there either.

This Ethercat setup looks like it could be a better solution, assuming all I have to do is add a magjack to the PCB. A friend of mine is (hopefully) working on adding I2C IO to that project, a Teensy is a bit short on pins and I had to use expanders to get everything in there.

The ethercat shield just uses spi interface. So you can probably re-use the library without issue.

i love it, and i would be doing it, but the price.... the mikro one is not too bad, but the IC alone is expensive.

can you use these for motion control of a stepper or 3?

edit, wait i already knew the answer
hackaday.io/project/181058-ethercat-servodrive

blazini36 wrote:

This Ethercat setup looks like it could be a better solution, assuming all I have to do is add a magjack to the PCB.

it looks like ethercat slave devices need their own ethercat IC, it doesnt look like you can do it in software, at least i have not found any examples/code

cakeslob wrote:

I think you're right. After you mentioned that I looked at the Ethercat application note and they specifically refer to slave devices as requiring an ESC or Ethercat Slave Controller that contains the ethernet PHY. It can be built in FPGA too but from what I gather the slaves are hardware.

What chip does the EasyCat use, a LAN9252? They're $12 a pop, I could manage it as long as I don't have to mess with code.

The ethercat license is built into the Lan9252 and any other ethercat chipset so it will never be able to done in software.
There are some open sources slave designs.

Are you going to add the analog pins and joystick counters?

I have ordered the 'EtherCAT Click',
19$ shipping to Germany, but still cheaper than everything you get here.
Will try to get it work with my RIO Project on an FPGA

I'm interested in how you go with the Mikroe EtherCat Click and RIO