read an EtherCAT device address

[MichaelAivaliotis]

Some EtherCAT devices have 3 rotary switches that you can use to set the device address. How do I find out what this address is from LabVIEW? I know if you daisy chain ethercat devices then the device number that shows up in LabVIEW is the order of the network connection. I'm not asking for that. This is a fixed address assigned by using the physical switches. I'm assuming there is an ethercat spec for defining this in an SDO somewhere.

[MarkCG]

I believe it's the "position address" property that you can read when you wire in an EtherCAT slave vairable to a property node. I believe you can drag the variable from the project or discover programmatically

[MichaelAivaliotis]

No, I'm already aware of that property. This "position address" is not the one I'm looking for. That lists the address assigned to the device by the NI ECAT driver after it scans the network, which is different. For example, if you have 3 devices daisy-chained. Then the addresses are 1,2,3 (or 0,1,2).

[MichaelAivaliotis · Accepted solution]

To follow-up on this. I got a response from NI support. They claim that this feature is only required by FSoE (Functional Safety Over Ethercat). Their hardware doesn't support this ETG spec so therefore they cannot read the hardware ID. It would be nice for NI to support this capability as it's becoming more popular in industrial automation.