Research On An Embedded Master Based On The Industrial Ethernet EtherCAT

With the continuous development of industrial automation technology, the traditionalfield bus is unable to meet the industrial demand, because it is slow, high cost and has smalldata-packet capacity, which has promoted the rapid development of industrial ethernet.Industrial ethernet becomes an important development direction and research hotspot ofindustrial control field bus technology.In this article, a low cost, high-efficiency embedded master controller with EtherCATcommunication interface is designed after the comprehensive and systematic studies onindustrial ethernet and embedded system. The master controller combines the rapidlydeveloped industrial ethernet technology–EtherCAT with embedded system, and can be usedto control the slave devices that have EtherCAT communication interface. The detailed designof hardware and software of the EtherCAT master controller is the key research content.In terms of the hardware design, the master controller chooses S3C2440of Samsung asthe kernel processor, DM9000as the network card chip to realize the EtherCAT networkcommunication and chooses touch screen to realize human-machine interaction. Based on theoverall concept of hardware, the main power supply module, external memory module,communication module and touch screen module are detailed designed.In terms of the software design, the master controller uses Libpcap and Libnet functionlibrary to implement the capturing and sending of EtherCAT data frame under Linux system,and based on that, the communication program of EtherCAT master controller is designed. Byusing Qt software, the function modules of the master controller, like the main interface,command parsing module, automatic operation module, etc, are detailed designed to realizethe human-machine interaction and the control of the slave devices.Finally, based on the design of hardware and software, an experiment platform is built totest the function of the master controller, like the EtherCAT network communication,synchronization accuracy control and slave devices control. The results show that the designof the master controller meets the requirements.