Hi,
I am looking for any advice regarding interfacing EtherCAT slave devices with the PLCNext. The naive solution that I can find is to purchase a Profinet → EtherCAT gateway (i.e https://www.adfweb.com/Home/products/EtherCAT_PROFINET.asp?frompg=nav35_37 or https://www.anybus.com/products/gateway-index/anybus-xgateway/detail/anybus-x-gateway-ethercat-slave---profinet-io-device). I am not sure if there is any other hardware in the PLCNext or Phoenix contact range that would solve this problem in a nicer manner ?
Cheers,
Lindsay
Hi Lindsay,
Thank you for reaching out.
Unfortunately we currently don’t have a solution for PLCnext Runtime that can support EtherCAT master.
Outside of PLCnext, Phoenix Contact has EtherCAT slave devices.
Regards,
Declan
Declan,
thanks for the response (apologies for the late reply - I normally get email notifications).
Other alternatives that I have found seem to be switching to the codesys runtime which has an EtherCat master implementation, or alternately perhaps getting the ethernet extension module and trying to do something with https://github.com/OpenEtherCATsociety/SOEM or https://etherlab.org/en/ethercat/index.php. Both options would likely require a fair amount of work.
Cheers,
Lindsay