Troubleshooting and Monitoring Tool for EtherCAT® Networks

With EC-Inspector acontis is adding a new easy to use Windows tool for troubleshooting and monitoring of EtherCAT® Networks to the tools category.

The program acts independently of the master controller and works with EtherCAT masters from many manufacturers (Beckhoff, Omron, Bosch-Rexroth, Lenze, acontis, etc.). EC-Inspector analyzes the complete data traffic between the master and the EtherCAT slaves via a TAP (Test Access Point) device. The TAP is recommended to be placed between the master and the first slave, but it can also be installed between any two slave devices.

By using EC-Inspector you can benefit from a lot of advantages like:

• No integration with an existing master controller required
• No impact (e.g. timing, load) on the existing application
• No changes to existing software required
• Very small engineering effort: Simply use the existing ENI file
• Use the same tool to analyze machines operated by controllers from different manufacturers

In addition to live monitoring of process data (inputs and outputs), EC-Inspector can also be applied to analyze communication faults on the EtherCAT network. As long as the EtherCAT master software is regularly checking the slave error counter register, this data can also be analyzed by EC-Inspector and the faults can be clearly visualized in the topology view. Alarms are created in case of new errors are appearing and in parallel all messages are saved in a log file.