FMTCopensourcesEtherCATｍａｓｔｅｒlibrary开发组件

The Flanders Mechatronics Technology Centre has decided to release
their EtherCATｍａｓｔｅｒimplementation as open source software. The
EtherCATｍａｓｔｅｒlibrary, together with its technical documentation can
be obtained from http://ethercatmaster.berlios.de. Technical discussions
and patches are welcomed on the mailing list, accessible from the same
website.
“When we started our investigation of Ethernet fieldbus systems two
years ago, EtherCAT was still an upcoming technology”, explains Bob
Koninckx, program manager at FMTC. “We saw, however, great potential
for Motion Control applications. Also the possibility to use CANopen as
the application layer, allowing for an easy upgrade of existing CAN-based
applications was much appreciated”, he continues.
FMTC member companies are machine builders, active in very specialized
markets, like textile, sheet metal working, agriculture etc. Often they build
their own control solution, simply because they can not find solutions that
meet their needs on the market. A fieldbus, regardless of its technical
merits, that can not be easily integrated with their in-house developed
controllers, will therefore never be interesting to them. “In order to
assess the usefulness of EtherCAT for our member companies, we were
more or less obliged to make our own implementation”, Bob Koninckx
says.
“We were pleased that our steering committee agreed with the above
ideas and allowed us to release our EtherCATｍａｓｔｅｒimplementation as
open source software at the end of the project. Also the support we got
from the EtherCAT Technology Group was much appreciated”, he adds.
In his opinion, this was one of the strongest arguments they could possibly
make to prove that EtherCAT indeed is an open technology.
Martin Rostan, Executive Director of the EtherCAT Technology Group:
“The FMTC open source EtherCATｍａｓｔｅｒlibrary is a most welcome
enhancement to the EtherCAT technology offering. It provides EtherCAT

connectivity to the open source community and will contribute to the
success story of our high performance Ethernet- based fieldbus system.
The concerns that open source projects might dilute conformance with
the standard were met by careful additions to the GNU public license:
code developed in this project has to remain compatible with the
EtherCAT specs and a valid EtherCAT implementation.”
“The software has been written for and has been tested with the eCos
operating system (http://ecos.sourceware.org)”, explains Klaas Gadeyne,
FMTC’s lead developer of the library. “It has however been written with
portability in mind. We did our best to limit the dependencies on the
operating system to a bare minimum and localized them in only a few files.
Porting to another operating requires as little as 700 lines of source code
to be inspected and possibly modified”, he continues.
“I think we provided something useful”, Bob Koninckx concludes. “The
sources are now available. I really hope that the project will pick up and
that people will start using them, improving them, porting them and
contribute their modifications.”