Online version identification of EtherCAT devices

The production information for an EtherCAT slave device

• Firmware version
• Hardware version
• Date of manufacture

is readable as described above by the serial number marked by laser on the side. The firmware /hardware (FW/HW) version is also electronically readable from there in the case of "complex" devices with CoE capability, but not in the case of simple devices without CoE.

Therefore, the production information listed above has been programmed into EtherCAT Terminals by Beckhoff since the production date July 2012. It is located in the EtherCAT ESI EEPROM, which is a component of every Beckhoff EtherCAT slave.

• ESI/XML
• these data can be read by the user program (PLC, non-RT task) from the EtherCAT master being used
• for TwinCAT the functions from the TcEtherCAT.lib are to be used here (other EtherCAT masters depending on capability)
• the data are available online (with live connection to the device) and offline
• CoE (online)
• these data can be read by the user program (PLC, non-RT task) from the CoE directory of the device over EtherCAT
• for TwinCAT the functions from the TcEtherCAT.lib are to be used here (other EtherCAT masters depending on CoE capability)
• the data are available only online
  (In the case of offline access, an EtherCAT master such as TwinCAT can present the data case by case from the ESI Dictionary of the XML file - however, these are then only the data of a foreseen slave).
• ESI EEPROM
• these data can
  - be displayed online by a TwinCAT 2.11R3 from build 2035
  - be read by the user program (PLC, non-RT task) from the ESI EEPROM of the device over EtherCAT (see sample program)
• for TwinCAT the functions from the TcEtherCAT.lib are to be used here (other EtherCAT masters depending on CoE capability)
• the data are available only online
• imprint on the side: not possible electronically.

Online Production Info (ESI EEPROM)

Note

Data storage in the ESI EEPROM In case of an EEPROM update of the EtherCAT slave by the EtherCAT master, e.g. for the purpose of a revision update, the production data located there are overwritten if the EtherCAT master does not exclude these data from being overwritten. From TwinCAT 2.11 the System Manager monitors these data during the update.

From TwinCAT 2.11R3 build 2035 the production information for HW, FW and date can be displayed in the system manager and exported.

Devices without this information display 0 in the overview.

From TwinCAT 3.1, the display is activated via the Advanced Settings of the EtherCAT master:

The data can be exported directly to a CSV file.

Sample program for reading and exporting the "production info" from the PLC

Using the sample programs This document contains sample applications of our products for certain areas of application. The application notices provided here are based on typical features of our products and only serve as samples. The notices contained in this document explicitly do not refer to specific applications. The customer is therefore responsible for assessing and deciding whether the product is suitable for a particular application. We accept no responsibility for the completeness and correctness of the source code contained in this document. We reserve the right to modify the content of this document at any time and accept no responsibility for errors and missing information. The program presented below serves as an initial introduction to the options for analyzing the slave data and production information. The user is free to change the program to suit his ideas or to use only part of the code.

Sample program (Download)

In this sample program some identification data of the connected EtherCAT slave are read out and displayed in a visualization (Fig. System Manager Online View -> Properties). The configured data are read out using the function blocks from TcEtherCAT.lib. Online data such as manufacturer (vendor) and production date are determined by access to the ESI EEPROM. Communication with the EEPROM can be established simply and quickly by the use of the function block ‘FB_ReadEEPROM’ included in this project. In addition there is an option to export the data in a file in the text table formats ‘*.txt’ and ‘*.csv’ . In the ‘*.csv’ option the German standard with a semicolon as separator is selected.

In common spreadsheet programs various sorting and filtering options can be applied to the exported data, e.g. "Table with headers".

tcecproductioninfo_demo.zip