EasyCAT HAT
EasyCAT HAT
The EasyCAT HAT allows a Raspberry board to become an EtherCAT® slave. The combination of the Raspberry world and 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® operator panels
- Educational purposes
- Data acquisition and storage
- Simulators for other EtherCAT® devices
FEATURES:
The EasyCAT HAT allows the exchange of 32 bytes input and 32 bytes output, configurable up to 128 bytes on the EtherCAT® bus. Communication is handled entirely in hardware, and data exchange with the processor is carried out via SPI.
The EasyCAT HAT supports three types of synchronization: Free RUN, SM Sync, and Distributed Clocks.
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 is very straightforward, as 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 useful 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 variable names and data types to use them more conveniently.
The Easy Configurator is a software tool that allows you to do this simply and intuitively, without having to dive into the complexities of the EtherCAT® protocol specifications.
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 with an easy and intuitive operator interface, allowing 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 feature of being encapsulated in a UDP frame. Just connect your EasyCAT board to your PC’s LAN port, start Easy Navigator, and enjoy EtherCAT®.
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