Anyone familiar with EtherCAT

General
1

We have a customer with a piece of equipment we have never really touched before. It’s got some Lenze Servos, a Lenze P500 PLC/HMI Combo acting as an EtherCAT Master, and a block of I/O on the EtherCAT bus as well

The PLC/HMI Combo is starting to fail, and even though the machine isn’t that old the servos and controller are no longer supported. The OEM is quoting a pretty ridiculous price to replace everything, and we have been tasked with trying to understand how it works and quote a replacement as well.

I’ve never touched EtherCAT before, I thought from looking in the past it required a dedicated hardware chip to process the frames, and as it works at the Data Link layer doesn’t work with TCP/IP. I assumed this meant to connect to a VSD or I/O I would need some sort of EtherCat network adapter for my PC…but as I’m trying to dig a bit deeper I may not have that fully correct.

I’ve also seen something implying that I might be able to bridge through the P500 to the EtherCAT network. IE I connect to the standard Ethernet network side of the P500, and use it as a media converter of sorts to get to the Servos and get parameters, etc, I guess similar to how you could browse through the backplane on a ControlLogix to talk to a device over DH+, etc.

I’m struggling to find specifics though, and as this machine is already starting to fail and they have no spare P500, we don’t want to do too much poking around and break things before we can even figure out how it works.

Anyone have any thoughts they can offer?

2

I have worked on robots that used all EtherCat, but never dug into the EtherCat myself.

For their master they used a fanless Linux PC with an EtherCat port.

Supposedly once you get into EtherCat it is easier to use than TCP over ETH/IP, which is why a lot of companies [especially Chinese ones] are using it exclusively.

3

I was on site yesterday and managed to get all the info I needed using the P500 as an EtherCAT gateway. In hindsight I guess it all makes sense, having never touched EtherCAT and trying to understand it I wasn’t quite sure. It didn’t help that almost all of what I was finding was saying “this is how it works with Beckhoff”, and while they are both Codesys based, it wasn’t clear if it would work the same with the Lenze Controller (it’s also my first time using Codesys)