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Hi all,
Does anyone know if it is possible to communicate with EK1100 directly without using a real-time hardware (no PLC) ? I am trying to set up the Profinet settings for EL6631 that we will use through Siemens PLC. I thought there might be a way to talk to the bus coupler by creating a local project without having to use a Beckoff PLC.
Has anyone ever done something like that?
Thank you!
@iotea Hey, the EK1100 is a physical media coupler, nothing else, it converts EtherCAT Tx (copper) to EBUS (LVDS) that's all. It has no intelligence or other means of communicating. As such you will need an EtherCAT master to communicate with it. You don't require a Beckhoff PLC for this though, you can run one from your laptop, TwinCAT or another supplier like Acontis or EtherLab for example. But this usually needs a RT capable chipset on the network port. TwinCAT has an intermediate driver you could use on a nonRT chipset but this has restrictions especially on sync performance.
@chrisk Thank you very much!! Merry Christmas! 🎄🎅
Do you think I can achieve this when running the TwinCAT on VM? Or should I install the TwinCAT on my laptop and set the laptop ethernet port as the Real-Time Ethercat Adapter? Then I will be able to scan devices and find the EK1100 and other modules?
@iotea well, I have it installed on my host machine, but i have control over that, your admin rights might not let you. I have the intermediate driver. In theory it should work, possibly bridge the vm network port to the host machine port. But I've never tried it like that. Some guys have done a lot of work on twincat in vms. Jakob did This and This for example.
Your issue will be the network port on the laptop, not many are real time capable, but you won't know that until you try.
