Yes oddly enough it's a significanly cheaper product made from > significanlty more expensive components.
Oddly? No. This is what always happens with electronics if you wait. Today Ethercat looks to be the way the world of automatic is going. It was adopted as a preferred standard in China and there are many German companies turning out ICs. Wait long enough these will be commodity priced parts. Remember with Gecko style stepper drivers we expensive? What's going to happen is ST Micro or a company like it (TI?) will release an ARM M with Ethercat PHY as a built in peripheral. Then you have can have a one chip controller. (just add RJ45 and magnetics) They already build I2C, SPI and Ethernet into the $1 chips. They will do Ethercat at some point. -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
