EtherCAT®& Arduino
Make your EtherCAT device in an easy way
with the power of Arduino
EasyCAT Shield per Arduino
The EasyCAT Shield allows an Arduino board to become an EtherCAT® slave.
Combining the Arduino world with the EtherCAT® world will enable you to create numerous automation devices in a simple, fast, and cost-effective way.
Some possible applications are:
- Analog and digital I/O devices with the ability to pre-process and process signals such as averaging, linearization, filtering, etc.
- PWM generators to drive motors and more
- Serial gateways RS-232, RS-485, CAN, Modbus TCP/IP, etc., to and from EtherCAT®
- EtherCAT® TFT Touch Display
- Educational purposes
- Simulators for other EtherCAT® devices
The EasyCAT Shield uses the 3×2 SPI connector to communicate with the microcontroller. This connector is standard on all Arduino boards, but some compatible boards do not include it. In such cases, the SPI signals are always present on pins 13, 12, and 11. An example of these boards is the STM32 Nucleo line, part of the Mbed ecosystem.
To solve this issue, the EasyCAT Shield revision “C” has three solder jumpers underneath the board, allowing the SPI signals (SCK, MISO, and MOSI) to be connected to pins 13, 12, and 11. Check out this application note:
FEATURES:
The EasyCAT Shield allows the exchange of 32 bytes input and 32 bytes output, configurable up to 128 bytes on the EtherCAT® bus. Communication is entirely managed in hardware, and data exchange with the Arduino sketch is done through a library provided with the EasyCAT along with the EtherCAT® configuration XML file (ESI).
The EasyCAT Shield supports three types of synchronization: Free RUN, SM Sync, and Distributed Clocks.
For your convenience, the EasyCAT Shield can be ordered with the three solder jumpers already set and the 3×2 connector not installed on the board.
To request this option, select EasyCAT spi_on_13_12_11 on the webshop.
CUSTOM DATA:
The EasyCAT is supplied configured with 32+32 bytes, meaning it can exchange 32 bytes input and 32 bytes output with an EtherCAT® master.
This setup is very straightforward since everything is already configured, so the user only needs to access the input/output variables in their application. However, in some situations, it may be helpful to modify this fixed configuration to better meet specific needs.
For example, it may be necessary to exchange more than 32+32 bytes, or customize the names and data types of the variables for easier use.
The Easy Configurator is a software tool that allows you to do this simply and intuitively, without having to delve into the complexities of the EtherCAT® protocol specifications.
EasyCAT Test Shield
To test the functionality of the EasyCAT Shield, we have created this simple Shield equipped with 2 potentiometers, 4 DIP switches, and 4 LEDs to easily simulate 2 analog inputs, 4 digital inputs, and 4 digital outputs. It is particularly suitable for schools, universities, or makers to quickly experiment and create applications with EtherCAT® and Arduino.
Easy Navigator
To meet the request of many customers asking for a simple software tool to test applications developed with our EasyCAT boards, we have developed Easy Navigator. It is a very simple EtherCAT® Master, featuring an easy and intuitive user interface that allows you to easily read and write values from/to the EasyCAT boards. No special library like WinPCAP is required, as it uses the EtherCAT® protocol’s ability to be encapsulated in a UDP frame. Simply connect your EasyCAT board to your PC’s LAN port, start Easy Navigator, and enjoy EtherCAT®.
Easy Master
The Easy Master is a library for Arduino that implements a very simple EtherCAT® Master, primarily intended for testing and experimentation with the EasyCAT board line. It has been designed to require very limited resources, especially in terms of RAM, allowing it to run on an Arduino Uno, which has only 2K RAM, partially already occupied. To achieve this, it cannot fully comply with EtherCAT® specifications, and therefore the communication is limited to cyclic PDO data exchange and does not support acyclic SDO commands via the mailbox. To function, the Ethernet Shield 2 is also required.
Tested boards
Uno, Mega, Due, M0Pro, Zero, 101, Nano, STM32 Nucleo.
Open Source Master
to test our boards
There are numerous EtherCAT® Masters on the market; some of them are open source and are a great help for starting to test with our boards. We recommend three of them:
which works in the Windows environment
which works in the Linux environment
which works in Windows and Linux environments