Newsletter

Winter 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.

We hope this newsletter finds you well. We have been hard at work during the winter months with new updates to all of our products.

In addition to the work on our products, we continue to bring you more content available online.

We have our YouTube Channel and will continue to add more useful videos in the coming year.

We have our new Developer Center with more and more useful interactive documentation and examples.

And recently we created a GitHub page for our open source projects.

Latest Updates

EC-Master has been updated to version 3.1.1. This is a minor update that includes:

• New Python Interface
• Support for Linux Foundation Project Zephyr
• Support for VxWorks SR650 on ARM64

Current Version

Our EtherCAT Master software version 3.1.1.01 is available now. For a full list of changes please see our Release Notes.

New Python Programming Interface

EC-Master V3.1.1 enables customers to program an EtherCAT application in the Python programming language.

Based on a wrapper library which provides the EC-Master APIs for object oriented access and the Python wrapper module, scripts can be developed and executed. Similar to the other example applications the EcMasterDemoPython example app shows how to use the EtherCAT Master API.

The python demos can also run in an interactive mode to, for example, set an output of the EtherCAT network. This is very useful to quickly test different behaviors of the EtherCAT network like with the new acontis EC-Simulator.

Support for Linux Foundation Project Zephyr RTOS

EC-Master V3.1.1 supports the Zephyr Project out-of-the-box.

Zephyr is an open-source real-time operating system (RTOS) for connected resource-constrained devices, built to be secure and safe. Assisted by the acontis high performance real-time Ethernet drivers (link layers) an update rate of 5 kHz can be guaranteed.

The EcMasterDemo example application includes the complete source code and a ready-to-run project file for the free integrated development environment CMake.

Latest Updates

We recently released EC-Engineer Web V2.0. Some recent new features include:

• Integrations for EC-Simulator
• Support for Multiple Tasks and Master Sync Units
• Support for Variable Renaming

Current Version

EC-Engineer version 3.3.0 and EC-Engineer Web version 2.0 is available now. Please click the button below to register for an update.

Latest Updates

We recently updated our EtherCAT network simulation software with new options for interfacing with the process data. It is now possible to interact with process data in 3 distinct ways:

1. Customer-specific Application
2. Integrated Sample Application (CiA 402 Motion Profile)
3. Actual Slave Application Firmware

Option 1: Default Implementation (Slave 1)

Process data logic implemented by a customer application from the process data image.

Option 2: Integrated Sample Application (Slave 2)

Process data provided by a sample application, e.g., CiA402, instead of the process data image. Here the behavior of the sample application can't be changed. This can be selected from within EC-Engineer when building the EC-Simulator configuration.

Option 3: Actual Slave Application (Slave 3)

EC-Simulator now supports an interface for developing and testing actual slave device firmware. Software hooks are provided for connecting Slave Stack Code APPL_XXX() functions to the actual slave application code. Here it is possible to control the EtherCAT State Machine, handle process data, work with CoE objects, etc.

Latest Updates

We recently updated our complete line of Windows Real-time Hypervisor solutions to V7.1. One major update is the support for 64 Bit real-time Linux kernel in addition to traditional 32 Bit real-time Linux kernel.

This new version also includes:

• Support for Windows 10 20H2
• WIBU CodeMeter runtime updated to 7.10a.
• TimeStamp default-source changed from HPET to TSC which leads to lower latencies.
• More CPUs will now benefit from Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) and Memory Bandwidth Allocation (MBA)
• Support for CAT CDP (Code and Data Prioritization). Using CDP it is possible to configure Code and Data Cache separately. This may be useful to avoid critical code from being pushed out of the cache when big data areas are accessed.
• RTOS32Win and EC-Win(RTOS-32) now support On Time RTOS-32 version 6.20
• VxWin support for VxWorks 7 SR 620 and SR 630

Current Version

Our Windows Real-time Hypervisor solutions (EC-Win, RTOS32Win, LxWin, VxWin, and CeWin) version 7.1 is available now. For a full list of changes please see our Release Notes.

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