Configure EtherCAT Motion Bus

Before configuring your EtherCAT***EtherCAT is an open, high-performance Ethernet-based fieldbus system. The development goal of EtherCAT was to apply Ethernet to automation applications which require short data update times (also called cycle times) with low communication jitter (for synchronization purposes) and low hardware costs settings, you may wish to add third party EtherCAT devices. See Add & Configure Third Party Devices for more information.

Double-click the EtherCAT node in the Project Explorer to open the EtherCAT properties dialog in the workspace. This window is composed of following tabs:

Tab	Description
EtherCAT Devices tab	Displays all the E-Bus devices present in the project tree
EtherCAT Master Settings Tab	Allows you to configure the EtherCAT bus master
ENI File Tab	Allows you to use an external configuration file
ESI Files Tab	Display, add, and remove available ESI files

KAS includes an integrated tool to configure the EtherCAT master and start up the fieldbus operation.

The configuration tool enables you to:

Describe your motion topology as a configuration tree (see procedure in EtherCAT Devices tab)
Associate variables to the I/O channels of devices (see procedure in Map Input and Output to Variables)

About Slave devices

Slave devices can support several PDOs (for the list, PDOs for AKD, AKD2G, AKD-N, and S300/S700). Some of them are mandatory; others are optional.

One of the main tasks of the EtherCAT configuration is to select the PDOs used by each slave (see also EtherCAT Devices Summary Form) and group them all in the EtherCAT image.

PDOs contain real-time cyclic data which is deterministic. Non-cyclic data is not deterministic and is defined by Service Data Objects (SDO).

As explained in the introduction, input and output parameters are grouped in predefined blocks called PDOs.