Research And Realization Of EtherCAT Master Based On AM3358 Microprocessor

In order to cope with the ever-expanding production scale and the complexifying production process.The needs of industrial production require much faster than the traditional industrial bus,but traditional field bus such as WorldFip,CC-Link(Control & Communication Link),CAN(Controller Area Network),Devicenet,etc.have been unable to meet it.EtherCAT(Ethernet for Control Automation Technology)is currently the highest speed industrial fieldbus networks,which is widely used in motion control such as intelligent robot and high speed numerical control machine tool recent years due to the advantages of its high utilization rate of bandwidth,low delay of stacks and low switching latency.It is very significance that go into more detail on EtherCAT protocol,develop and extend the EtherCAT functionality to achieve the establishment of complex EtherCAT industrial networks and rapidly acquisition of big data.At present,some function not to be imperfect,EtherCAT is still in early phases of development.we need to continue to add new functionality to adapt to the development of industry production.In this paper,the mainly contributions of the development of EtherCAT protocol are as followings:Firstly,to satisfy the communication needs between the EtherCAT masters,to further extend the functionalities of EtherCAT network and to provide technical support of complex EtherCAT industrial network,the new protocol is designed to support communication between EtherCAT masters without any affects on the communication function of master and slave,upon which the IGH open source drive function is expanded and the communication between EtherCAT masters is achieved on AM3358 processor hardware platform.In this paper,the design is tested on RT-Preempt in real time Linux system and native Linux system,respectively.The test results show that this program is processed stably and can mutually communicate between the master to slave and master to master to meet different demands of industrial networks.Secondly,original EtherCAT protocol can not change the the damaged salves or add new slaves on-line,this paper presents a method for the hot plug of EtherCAT master protocol.To achieve the EtherCAT hot plug function,the test expand the original IgH open source driver in the kernel layer and design EtherCAT data processed architecture in the application layer which was based on Xenomai hard real-time operating system.The test results show that this method break the idea of EtherCAT master protocol which can only rely on redundancy to ensure system stability.Since the entire design without additional hardware which was based on software,this solution can reduce production costs for enterprise production,as well as provide more options for the expansion of production scale.