Real-Time Ethernet USB Adapter

Hi

I just given a swanky new laptop at work, which is lovely and everything, but does not have an ethernet port. Unfazed by this, I just got hold of a USB to LAN adapter and got to work.

My primary development environment is Beckhoff TwinCAT, and was rather gutted to find there are no real-time ethernet devices on the machine(attached image for reference).

I was wondering if there was any adapter that I could use for real-time ethernet device. I am aware of latency issues and this would only be used to test communication and make sure everything talk to each other.

Cheers

I'm shocked you can even find a laptop without an Ethernet port nowadays. Heck, even for the past 10 or 15 years.

The "wireless" world, people are getting to lazy to deal with cord to plug it in.

rdrast said:

I'm shocked you can even find a laptop without an Ethernet port nowadays. Heck, even for the past 10 or 15 years.

Click to expand...

Yeah one of those ultrabook workstation things

How about carrying around a wifi router? Connect to it with your laptop & CAT5 (or CAT6) it to PLC or office network. That would give you better comm's speed than a USB adapter I think.

I would honestly tell them thanks for the laptop, but please return this hipster one and let me pick out something that will be useful to someone who wants to accomplish work with the laptop

Must the Ethernet connection be true realtime ? I dont think so.
I am guessing you want to connect to a controller where the Twincat PLC runtime is running.
If so, you are not online via Ethercat (realtime) but via regular TCP/IP (not realtime).

JesperMP said:

Must the Ethernet connection be true realtime ? I dont think so.
I am guessing you want to connect to a controller where the Twincat PLC runtime is running.
If so, you are not online via Ethercat (realtime) but via regular TCP/IP (not realtime).

Click to expand...

The issue is not the bandwidth but the adapter itself being compatible with the Twincat system. I was told it has to be an intel chipset but I have no idea of how to find an usb adapter which will take intel drivers

Even with PCI ethernet cards, Beckhoff originally required a particular Intel chipset to work with their "real-time ethernet" driver. But, in later years, they supported many more NIC cards. However, I think it is rare to need "RT ethernet" today. I only used it with the BK9000 coupler for K-bus modules, before EtherCAT launched. When you auto-configure a new PLC project today, it "finds" RT ethernet for your NIC card (if supported), but I just take the RT ethernet "device" out of my project. Perhaps there are some external boxes that still need it (motor controllers?).

BTW, a USB-ethernet adapter can be problematic in other ways. I used one in a PLC project long ago as a "regular LAN" interface (not RT ethernet) into a Beckhoff PLC (from my VB HMI program). But, it would periodically get lost (ex. after reboot), so the user had to unplug and replug the adapter to get the link working. Beckhoff later added more NIC ports to their CPU's so I no longer needed the USB adapter.