Newsletter
Summer 2021

Welcome to the acontis technologies newsletter. We strive to issue this newsletter every few months to keep you informed about our latest updates and developments.

With the launch of EC-Inspector earlier this year, we now offer a few different software tools for monitoring and diagnosing problems on EtherCAT networks:

• EC-Engineer
• EC-Lyser
• EC-Inspector

EC-Master has been updated to version 3.1.2. This is a minor update that includes:

• Support for latest Intel Atom® x6000E Series (Elkhart Lake)
• Support for NXP i.MX RT1064 Crossover MCU with Arm® Cortex®-M7 Core
• Support for STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 microprocessor series with dual Arm® Cortex®-A7

EC-Master V3.1.2 supports out-of-the-box the Intel Atom® x6000E Series (Elkhart Lake) processor. For the two on chip Ethernet MACs an dedicated high performance real-time Ethernet driver (Link Layer) is provided. The solution is available for the operating systems Linux, Windows and others.

For the implementation the module conga-SA7 from congatec was used.

EC-Master V3.1.2 supports out-of-the-box the NXP i.MX RT1064 MCU together the development environment MCUXpresso SDK with FreeRTOS.

The MCUXpresso SDK is a comprehensive software enablement package designed to simplify and accelerate application development with Arm® Cortex®-M-based devices from NXP.

The on chip Ethernet MACs is controlled by a specific Ethernet driver (Link Layer) which realizes the fast and direct exchange of data between the master core and the Ethernet controller.

For the implementation the evaluation board MIMXRT1064-EVK: i.MX RT1064 from NXP was used.

The STM32MP1 on chip Ethernet Controller is supported by the acontis Real-time Driver DW3504. This driver replaces the standard Linux Ethernet network adapter (MAC) driver for real-time EtherCAT usage. The driver runs in User Space and handles the MAC directly for high performance cyclic operation. The driver requires direct access to the MAC that is made possible by Kernel Module called atemsys which is available under GPL.

The reference implementation is based on the discovery kit STM32MP157D-DK1 from STMicroelectronics.

EC-Simulator has been updated to version 3.1.2. In this new version we introduce a highly requested feature for our Hardware-in-the-Loop offering (HiL): mixing simulated slaves with real physical slaves.

With EC-Simulator HiL, you can define your complete network configuration (real slaves and simulated slaves) in EC-Engineer. We think this will bring even more usefulness to the simuator for digital twins and for simulating error scenarios.

EC-Inspector has been updated to version 3.5.2. We just announced and released this new product earlier this year, and we have many new and exciting features planned for it. In this new version we bring:

• Enhanced Variable Graphs with Trigger Functions
• Recording the captured data to a Wireshark file directly from within EC-Inspector (.pcap)

In version 3.5.2 the chart for the graphic display of the process data has been significantly improved. The last 500 values of each variable are shown in the chart over time, and the user can adjust if they want to see more or less values.

The continuous display can be stopped manually or automatically by programmable trigger conditions.

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