EtherCAT communication to Festo Drive

[hoky]

Hello,

I am just wondering, if it is possible to connect to FESTO valve terminal with EtherCAT protocol? What we basically need is to read and write some digital inputs and outputs from the LabVIEW application which controls the manufacturing process. In past we used Modbus but the customer wants to use EtherCAT protocol on this project (because of speed). Do anyone have any experiences with this kind of communication? I have found a lot of articles regarding the EtherCAT communication with NI Compact RIO but there will be no such device. Are there any native LabVIEW functions to use EtherCAT communication (I don't think so) or do we need to buy some third party library for this?

Thanks,

Lukas

[mikeporter]

This isn't a direct answer, but you might want to point out to your customer that running Modbus over TCP/IP is also very fast.

Mike...

[rolfk]

I'm working on a project where a Festo valve terminal is connected through EtherCAT to a IC-3173 Industrial Controller, which runs the Scan Engine with integrated EtherCAT support. Works fine but is probably not the setup you envision. 

If you want to do this in LabVIEW for Windows you will probably want to look into this library.

Maybe this would be also an option but I don't think it is what you are looking for.

[Yin_W]

Is this product you're pursuing?

https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/tools-network/download.ethercat-slave-pc-labview.html

[hoky]

Yes, when I was "looking around" I also checked this library...