BECKHOFF EtherCAT. Where to find help.

Our plant just received a machine with Beckhoff TwinCAT. The remote devices are wired through EtherCAT(EK1100). I know very little about this system. Been on Beckhoff's website for technical help but no very useful. Does anyone know where there is a good site for learning Beckhoff products.

For Example. Can I plug EtherCAT into regular ethernet?

Thanks
Tom

Here is a quick intro to TwinCAT. It doesn't cover EtherCAT, but it will introduce you to the programming environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_nFE9wx8OM

best thing to do is to download twincat, it is free from Beckhoff and has a 30 day runtime. There is a drill demo project to get you started - just use the PLC Control program.

When you have mastered that and can see how the drill program works, get a spare EK1100 module with some I/O and use the system manager to 'link' physical IO to PLC I/O.

It is a slow learning process even if you have good AB/Siemens/Schneider PLC experence. But great when you know how. Ask call your local Beckhoff office and ask him to talk you through things when you get stuck.

Hope this helps

Matt

tomwhite007_2008 said:

For Example. Can I plug EtherCAT into regular ethernet?

Click to expand...

Yes, you can - in the sense it will not smoke or burn. EtherCAT comms run on a regular CAT5 medium at 100 Mb/s (no Gigabit ethernet yet)

However, EtherCAT network better be kept separate from the regular one, to avoid disturbances and delays. Normally one can expect a PC that runs the system to have at least two separate network cards installed: one for EtherCAT and one for general/plant/office network.

Informationwise... well, I feel your pain. Bits and pieces from a vartiety of help files rendered in bad English. Beckhoff web site is the source of all this.

You may also establish friendship with the nearest Beckhoff sales/tech support rep - you would eventually need spares so they might be interesetd to help you.

LadderLogic said:

However, EtherCAT network better be kept separate from the regular one, to avoid disturbances and delays. Normally one can expect a PC that runs the system to have at least two separate network cards installed: one for EtherCAT and one for general/plant/office network.

Click to expand...

Can you mix EtherCAT and Ethernet? The reason I ask is that I have a CP6201 control panel PC running Windows CE with 2 Ethernet ports.

I use one at Ethernet to communicate to it with my laptop and the other is EtherCAT connected to the EtherCAT network consisting of EtherCAT EK1100 bus coupler modules. I have enabled cable redundancy (so the 2nd port is binded to EtherCat) but then as soon as this is done is system manager, I can no longer get remote access from my laptop to the CP6201?

LadderLogic said:

Informationwise... well, I feel your pain. Bits and pieces from a vartiety of help files rendered in bad English. Beckhoff web site is the source of all this.

Click to expand...

Yes, I could have never developed our product without some help from our local Beckhoff rep now and then, but most self learnt from having the software, Beckhoff web site and lots of time. I have found most of the information available for Beckhoff is on their site, maybe all the external stuff is on the support forums that are in German..

matt_sd said:

but then as soon as this is done is system manager, I can no longer get remote access from my laptop to the CP6201?

Click to expand...

Yes, that is normal. By default, only EtherCAT packets are running, nothing else.

However, there is an additional feature, called EoE (Ethernet over EtherCAT) that allows to 'embed' regular Ethernet traffic (TCP, UDP) over the EthrCAT one. It has to be enabled and configured in System Manager.

Still, be careful. Although EtherCAT is blazingly fast, any other stuff running along the same physical line will necessarily degrade the performance.

P.S. As a matter of fact, there are couple other protocols that can run over EtherCAT as if it was a virtual fieldbus: CoE allows to use things like CANOpen and DeviceNet.

Thanks very much for that information LadderLogic,

I can see that EoE in system manager, didn't realise it means Ethernet over EtherCAT.

I will take a look at it. I may be able to get my redundancy working and still be able to access the Windows CE panel PC.

I will only use the Ethernet for setting up etc so 99.9% of the time there will be no Ethernet traffic so hopefully shouldn't degrade the performance.

Regards

Matt

At a recent Beckhoff seminar, they stated that many user's have the same need of a 3rd ethernet NIC. Their latest CX50** PC (Intel Atom) has 3 NIC's.

It is a little confusing. The first NIC on all E-bus CX's connects to the E-bus. The 2nd NIC on the CX10** CX's is the RJ45 port on the front. If two RJ45's, they are off the same NIC (like a switch). The CX50** is different. It's two RJ45's are separate NIC's, which you should see in Windows Network Connections (guessing).

I think the CX1020's 2 front ports were to allow eliminating a separate ethernet switch when chaining CX's. The CX50** loses that, so probably no longer needed (new ethernet modules?). I have never set up a multi-CX system.

The gain is that you now have a 3rd NIC port for communications with an operator's PC that controls the PLC from a Windows program. Previously, you had to use a problematic USB-ethernet adapter (mine sometimes lost connection on reboot). Of course, many people run the Operator's program on the CX, so not needed. Reasons you might want a supervisory PC - full featured w/ hard drive for fast file access, better graphics for plotting, keep games off PLC brain, control remote CX or CX's from one station that is a central repository for files and data, etc.

I have seen configurations like that. The first NIC is configured for realtime communications (EtherCAT), the second one for non-realtime stuff inside the machine: an HMI, vision systems and what not.

The third one would be used to connect to the plant network.

Some prefer even to split EtherCAT into different groups: a separate drop for the servos, a separate for I/O and so on. So there could be even more NICs on the machine.