EC-Lyser - EtherCAT Diagnosis Tool

EtherCAT diagnosis and error detection tool

EC-Lyser is a diagnosis application specifically developed to analyze EtherCAT bus systems that are controlled by the acontis EC-Master Stack. Automated control systems usually require high availability of the whole system. Due to the rough industrial environment this is often hardly to achieve. Possible reasons for failure are:

	bad cables or plugs
	vibrations
	system degradation (temperature, oxidation, mechanic failure, …)
	electromagnetic fields
	...

If high availability shall be guaranteed for a automated control system it is important to verify and maintain the field bus. Using EC-Lyser it is possible to take a look into the "health" of the EtherCAT system. Detection of signs of system degradation prior to running into a system failure will be of great benefit. In that case it is possible to exchange the problematic components (cables, slave devices).
Many aspects of diagnosis are covered by the EC-Lyser:

	Useful for setting up the system
	System analyzation and maintenance
	Error detection
	Documentation

Highlights

	Graphical bus topology display.
	Validate EtherCAT slave and master error counters and display the connection quality in the topology view.
	Define limits to determine connection quality (good, restricted or bad) that determine the behavior of the topology display view. Good connections will be diplayed green, restricted or bad connections in yellow or red, respectively.
	Via a simple click onto the appropriate node in the topology view detailed informations will be displayed: a) All available error counters (e.g. number of corruptly received Ethernet frames) b) General information like device name, EtherCAT address, Product Code, Revision etc. of the EtherCAT Slaves. c) Additional information like Distributed Clocks and „Slave-State“ d) Master informationen like „Master-State“, number of sent frames, number of lost frames
	For documentation purposes it is possible to store all current data (e.g. topology, slave info) into a XML file.
	Error and status messages (normally only available in the control system) will be shown in a separate log area
	Using a TCP/IP connection to a remote master it is possible to run diagnosis of a already running system at any time.
	EC-Lyser is shipped with an integrated EtherCAT Master that can be configured and controlled using a Control-Panel.

Technology

All data required by the EC-Lyser to display the topology view and provide system diagnosis will be directly transferred from the ETherCAT Master Stack (EC-Master) to the EC-Lyser diagnosis tool. As the EC-Master master stack provides a TCP/IP remote interface this can be accomplished by simply connecting the EC-Lyser with this interface. System analysis therefore will not require additional traffic on the EtherCAT bus. All information are directly taken from the EtherCAT master.

More information

Data sheets and evaluation versions are available in the download area.

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