Anyone seen this?

So Mikroe EtherCAT Click ($31.45 each when Qty >10) and an open source SPI interfaced MCU board is making a lot of sense.

Then the SPI board can also be used with RPI or Ethernet (Remora)

Teensy cost is high. What is the benefit over much cheaper MCU for this role?

pippin88 wrote:

Teensy cost is high. What is the benefit over much cheaper MCU for this role?
 

High? An 8bit 16mhz Arduino Uno costs $28 on Amazon. A 32bit 600mhz Teensy 4.1 costs $31 from PJRC. The Teensy has built in ethernet, just doesn't have a jack. That ethernet obviously can't be used for Ethercat but it certainly could have been used for Remora or whatever else if they supported it.

But people with any smarts are not buying a Uno for $28

In Australia, an ESP32 board is 1/7th the price of a Teensy 4.1
A RPI Pico is 1/10th the price.

Just another option I've seen. I believe this is what is inside the RTElligent ECT60 Stepper-Servo Driver 

Infineon sell ARM based micros with integrated EtherCAT slave controllers

XMC4300-F100K256 AA

the dev kit:

XMC4300 Relax EtherCAT ® Kit

pippin88 wrote:

But people with any smarts are not buying a Uno for $28

In Australia, an ESP32 board is 1/7th the price of a Teensy 4.1
A RPI Pico is 1/10th the price.
 

Lol let's bring this back to EtherCAT, none of that has anything to do with this thread. It's not even worth talking about comparing dev boards that use MCUs that don't have any proper peripherals for machine control vs one that has all the peripherals. There's a reason actual company's use STM32s and IMX1052/1062 for CNC controllers...they don't use RP2040s and ESP32s. They have their own uses, machine control is not one of them. Niether of them have proper hardware encoder peripherals and no, the PIO doesn't compare in any way to an IMX1062's hardware encoders. So build something with an Rpi Pico, and be happy you saved $20 over using a Teensy 4.1 then be dissapointed that it's about 1/4 the clock speed and can count an encoder about 1/50th the frequency. Not really worth the effort to me.

I'm here to talk about EtherCAT. There's no penny pinching with etherCAT unless your going to build the thing yourself. We should try to keep the discussion more along the lines about "hey it'd be nice to not spend $400 for an IO module"

bw4257 wrote:

Just another option I've seen. I believe this is what is inside the RTElligent ECT60 Stepper-Servo Driver 

Infineon sell ARM based micros with integrated EtherCAT slave controllers

XMC4300-F100K256 AA

the dev kit:

XMC4300 Relax EtherCAT ® Kit
 

The XMC4300 doesn't have Ethernet PHYs.

the LAN9252 has the 2 ethernet PHYs built in so it cal literally be a 1 chip IO module. Then SPI to an MCU for more stuff.

There's probably good reason to use those other ESCs but the built in microcontroller doesn't really add much benefit other than saving $5 on the BOM, maybe. That's a big deal if you're going to make alot of a thing. Doesn't really matter much in the world of low volume, high overhead. It's kind of better just to stick with a standard design so you can re-use schematics and layouts between PCBs. Seems like the LAN9592 is a better case for that.

There is a nice open source design using that chip:
github.com/feecat/XMC4300_EtherCAT_CoreBoard/tree/master