Hi all, First of all I am Gyorgy Miru, I used to develop HMI software that interfaced Siemens and Beckhoff devices. I no longer work in the industrial automation domain, but I have joined the list to share the (little) knowledge I have in the area.
As Chris correctly mentioned, EtherCat is the field bus protocol for the Beckhoff devices it uses a different physical layer and cabling than Ethernet. You probably don't want to implement this. The ADS protocol is used for the communication between different runtimes (soft PLCs, PLCs, HMIs). If you are looking for a way to test the ADS communication I suggest looking into TwinCat 3.1. It is the (latest) development environment for Beckhoff PLCs and it also contains a the soft PLC runtime. It used to have a free test/evaluation license which had some limitations (number of concurrent runtimes, maximum uptime) but it was sufficient for testing communication. On a last note, my experience was that these Beckhoff soft PLCs do not play well with virtualization at all. They completely break in a virtual environment. Cheers, Gym On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 11:40 AM, Justin Mclean <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > > By the way … the link to ethercat. This is a different protocol. It’s > more a real-time protocol where the PLC communicates with Drives, IOs and > stuff like that. > > No problem I was just looking at random links. > > > I just contacted Beckhoff and simply asked them what we have to do in > order to be allowed to implement. > > Sounds like the way forward to me. > > Thanks, > Justin
