Installing EtherCAT

ethercat-rs uses the libclang and protobuf libraries. To install them on ubuntu run:

sudo apt-get install libclang-dev
sudo apt-get install -y protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev

Installing the EtherCAT master

Install the dependencies (on ubuntu):
- sudo apt install autoconf libtool pkg-config
Install the ethercat master
- git clone https://gitlab.com/etherlab.org/ethercat.git
- cd ethercat
- use the stable-1.6 branch git checkout stable-1.6
  - if needed stable-1.5 will work too
- ./bootstrap
- ./configure --enable-generic --disable-8139too
- make all modules
- sudo make modules_install install
- sudo depmod

Rust stack will need to know where the ethercat binary is located. So add the path to the ethercat binary to the ETHERCAT_PATH variable

either by: export ETHERCAT_PATH=$HOME/ethercat

or add it to the .bashrc file

Configure EtherCAT master

In order configure the ethercat we need to give the master the MAC address of the PC/ehternet port.

run ip a to find the mac address of the ethernet port:

  2: enp8s0f2: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN group default qlen 1000
      link/ether d0:63:b4:05:47:37 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Modify the file /usr/local/etc/ethercat.conf
- MASTER0_DEVICE - set the mac address (ex. d0:63:b4:05:47:37) or the name of the port (ex. enp8s0f2)
- DEVICE_MODULES set to ”generic”
Then condifure the udev rules for /dev/EtherCAT0(go to the mode 0666)
- create the ethercat rule: sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/99-EtherCAT.rules
- add the following line: KERNEL == "EtherCAT[0-9]*" , MODE ="0666", GROUP ="users"
- reload the rules: sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

There are some helpful notion pages with a bit more info on the ethercat setup:

Setup EtherCAT

Integration to Bedrock (a bit more recent)

Also the ethercat docs are very helpful

Start the EtherCAT master

Start the ethercat master:

sudo ethercatctl start

Verify that /dev/EtherCAT0 exists

ls /dev/EtherCAT0

The output should be something like:

$ ls -l /dev/EtherCAT
crw-rw-rw- 1 root users 509, 0 Jun  4 07:01 /dev/EtherCAT0

Use ethercat (installed with make install after the compilation) to veviry is the master is working
- ex. ethercat graph (list of nodes connected)
- ex. ethercat slaves (list of slaves connected)

The output should be something like:

$ ethercat graph
/* EtherCAT bus graph. Generated by 'ethercat graph'. */

strict graph bus {
    rankdir="LR"
    ranksep=0.8
    nodesep=0.8
    node [fontname="Helvetica"]
    edge [fontname="Helvetica",fontsize="10"]

    master [label="EtherCAT\nMaster"]

}