DEWESoft are proud to announce the release of their new EthercatDAQ driver for our KRYPTON and SIRIUSe instruments. This driver replaces the WinPcap driver that was previously bundled with DEWESoft®.
ABOUT
EtherCAT stands for “Ethernet for Control and Automation” and it was initially designed for real-time control applications. Due to its synchronization technology (Distributed Clocks) and relatively high bandwidth (100 Mbit/s) it can also be used for data acquisition, but there were some additional features to be developed by DEWESoft® to really make it practical for the test and measurement industry.
The new driver presents a major improvement over the old WinPcap driver, because it works on a much lower architectural level, filtering out only specific data and forwarding it to DEWESoft®. This allows DEWESoft® to avoid searching through loads of data coming to the Ethernet port in order to find the correct data packets. This results in significant performance improvement.
When used with DEWESoft® SP8 or newer and corresponding firmware it also supports data packet re-transmission, which greatly improves reliability and also adds a punch to performance. Data packet re-transmission functionality prevents data from being lost by re-sending the messages that were lost or damaged, improves reliability at higher sample rates, boosting performance. This also means that longer cables will present less of a limitation in regards to the sample rate.
- No real-time hardware is required for the master. You can plug KRYPTON and SIRIUSe devices to any laptop running Dewesoft® X. To avoid the need for a real-time master, DEWESoft® devices use a local data buffer where at least half a second of data samples are stored. Utilising Distributed Clocks for synchronization, the acquisition is very much independent of the master. The master only has to send EtherCAT frames frequently enough to collect the data from the local buffers before they overrun.
- Samples are acquired equidistantly to a high precision. Even if the master has a large jitter, the samples are always taken equidistantly in time, since the AD converters are synchronized with Distributed Clocks, not with the frames coming from the master.
- No samples can be lost.Without a local data buffer, samples are lost if the message from the master gets lost along the way or if master is late due to jitter that can be caused by EMI, for example. Local data buffers ensure that samples lost in the bus can be transmitted again on request by the master. A lost sample can make a measurement useless which is very expensive in crash testing, for example.
Those additional features form the EtherCAT DAQ profile which is used by KRYPTON and SIRIUSe devices when connected to DEWESoft® X. 3rd party EtherCAT masters do not support this so called ‘buffered’ mode of operation, since they are designed for control and automation, not for data acquisition.
KRYPTON and SIRIUSe devices can also operate in a standard EtherCAT mode (“unbuffered” mode) and are therefore compatible with any EtherCAT master. In this so called ‘unbuffered’ or just ‘standard EtherCAT’ mode the devices simply pass the latest acquired sample to the bus where it is up to the master to collect it.
THE FOLLOWING TABLE SHOW THE COMPATIBILITY COMBINATIONS:
| EtherCAT (standard) “unbuffered” | EtherCAT DAQ “buffered” | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| master | DEWESoft® X | No | Yes |
| 3rd party EtherCAT master | Yes | No | |
| slave | KRYPTON, SIRIUSe | Yes | Yes |
| 3rd party EtherCAT slaves | Yes | No |
DEWESoft® SIRIUS instruments in the form of the R8 rack are also capable of operations in Dual mode. This includes acquiring data with DEWESoft® X running in the SBOX in the R8 and in parallel feeding the latest samples in real-time to a 3rd party EtherCAT master. This is possible because in this case SIRIUS racks interface to the SBOX over USB, not over EtherCAT DAQ profile. At the same time, the racks interface to the 3rd party master (operating from a real-time hardware) over a standard EtherCAT.
ETHERCAT DAQ PROFILE
STANDARD ETHERCAT
For further information on the DEWESoft EtherCAT Filter Driver in Australia & New Zealand, please contact Metromatics on +61 7 3868 4255 or sales@metromatics.com.au
For further information outside this area, contact DEWESoft directly on sales@dewesoft.com
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