Configure EtherCAT Motion Bus

Before configuring the 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 want to add third party EtherCAT devices.
See Add and 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	Used to configure the EtherCAT bus master.
ENI File tab	Used for 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.

Use the configuration tool to:

Describe your motion Topology as a configuration tree.
- See the procedure in EtherCAT Devices tab.
Associate variables to the I/O channels of devices.
- See the procedure in Map Input and Output to Variables.

Slave Devices

Slave devices can support several PDOs.

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

In EtherCAT Motion Bus Concepts, input and output parameters are grouped in predefined blocks called PDOs.

Some PDOs are mandatory; others are optional.
- See PDOs for AKD, AKD2G, AKD-N, S300, or S700 for the list.
One of the main tasks of the EtherCAT configuration is to select the PDOs used by each slave and group them all in the EtherCAT image.
- See EtherCAT Devices Summary Form for more information.