Insert EtherCAT master manually
This chapter shows how you can manually create an FC1028 EtherCAT card and its EtherCAT master if no active EtherCAT slaves are connected to the card. This is especially necessary if you already want to start with the project planning and the complete hardware configuration is not available.
This is in contrast to the automatic scanning of the card in TwinCAT (see: Scan card in TwinCAT).
Proceed as follows:
- 1. Start TwinCAT and open an empty project.
- 2. In the tree view on the left, right-click on I/O Devices.
- 3. Click Add New Item and select EtherCAT master to create an EtherCAT master. The window Device Found At appears.
- 4. Select the appropriate interface from the list according to the subsequent cabling. The list of interfaces is continued chronologically from 5 to 20, which corresponds to the total of 16 EtherCAT masters of the card.
As a reminder, the card has a total of eight ix-Industrial® type A interfaces, thus up to 16 EtherCAT devices can be connected to the eight interfaces. - 5. Create additional or required EtherCAT masters in TwinCAT in this way.
- You can start project planning at this point. As soon as the complete hardware configuration is available, you can scan each EtherCAT master and thus start the search for the EtherCAT slaves connected to it.
The EtherCAT slaves are created in TwinCAT according to your hardware configuration and the cabling under the respective EtherCAT masters.