pyecm

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

• clone repo (and submodules)

  use git clone <repo clone url> --recursive

• install vscode

• install docker desktop

• install vscode dev containers extension

• open vscode in repo

• click reopen in container

• open new terminal

• run pip install . && pytest