Hello EMC Users/Developers I'd like to bring up the discussion about Realtime Ethernet in EMC again. There were several discussions about this topic, from RAW Ethernet packages over RTNet to full fledged EthetCAT or SERCOS. The problem with the latter seems to be the not so open, so called open licenses and the special slave hardware involved rendering this technology not so well suited to the very low budget home cnc builder.
Recently I stumbled upon Ethernet Powerlink. They claim to offer a true open Realtime Ethernet protocol under the BSD license. Cycle times down to 500us with standard Ethernet Slaves and down to 100us with special hardware. http://www.ethernet-powerlink.org The open license makes it interesting for opensource projects like EMC. IMHO So far there does not seem to be any very low cost hardware available with Powerlink interface yet, But at least there is hardware available like digital/analog IO, drives and so on. This is a great plus compared to eg. RTNet. (There do not seem to be any products supporting RTNet, unfortunately). Furthermore the OSASL seems to be working on mainline Linux Kernel integration of their Ethernet Powerlink stack. http://www.osadl.org So, what do you guys think? Could Powerlink based products be a possible future replacement for the current pci cards and parallel port hardware in EMC, or at least be a good alternative to it? Maybe there will be open hardware projects with powerlink interface like e.g. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osmc/ or low budget commercial products like http://pico-systems.com/ and http://www.geckodrive.com/ regards Marc ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
