pyecm

An EtherCAT MainDevice in Python, fully free and open source.

Priority	Goal	Status
1	Fully functional and complete python bindings for the Simple Open EtherCAT Master SOEM (originally written in C) using nanobind	work in progress
2	Configuration of the MainDevice and SubDevices via an EtherCAT Network Information (ENI) file.	not started
3	Software-in-the-loop (SiL) network simulation capability.	not started
4	Async API.	not started

Warnings

This library is extremely early in development.

We will follow semantic versioning. Expect drastic changes to the API prior to v1.0.0.

Installation

Windows / Mac OSX compatibility is intended for developer convenience only. The intended targets are linux with PREEMPT_RT patches. Typically, the easiest to work with is Debian since pre-compiled patches are available from the repositories.

pip install pyecm

Windows

Windows requires installation of an additional dependency npcap. https://npcap.com/

Please install it in winpcap compatibility mode (I believe this is the default configuration.)

Usage

On a typical windows system:

C:\repos\pyecm>python examples/soem/simple_test.py --ifname "\Device\NPF_{6F17F41B-E756-4470-B7B8-74A3504B4F7B}"

will output something like:

C:\repos\pyecm>python examples/soem/simple_test.py --ifname "\Device\NPF_{6F17F41B-E756-4470-B7B8-74A3504B4F7B}"
simple_test.py args=Namespace(ifname='\\Device\\NPF_{6F17F41B-E756-4470-B7B8-74A3504B4F7B}', if2name=None)
ecx_init succeeded.
found 5 subdevices:
network summary:
position|configadr|aliasadr|name ---|manufacturer|product|revision
       0|main device
       1|0x1001   |0x0     |EK1100                  |0x2       |0x44c2c52 |0x100000  
       2|0x1002   |0x0     |EL3314                  |0x2       |0xcf23052 |0x120000  
       3|0x1003   |0x0     |EL2088                  |0x2       |0x8283052 |0x110000  
       4|0x1004   |0x0     |EL3681                  |0x2       |0xe613052 |0x120000  
       5|0x1005   |0x0     |EL3204                  |0x2       |0xc843052 |0x110000  
reached state: 2
successfully configured iomap. iomap size: 66
distrubuted clocks configured
reached state: 4
reached state: OPERATIONAL
started main operation
iomap:  [0 0 0 ... 0 0 0]

Development

1. clone repo (and submodules)

   use git clone <repo clone url> --recursive

2. install vscode

3. install docker desktop

4. install vscode dev containers extension

5. open vscode in repo

6. click reopen in container

7. open new terminal

8. run pip install . && pytest