EC-Lyser: EtherCAT diagnosis and error detection tool

EC-Lyser is a diagnosis application especially developed to analyze EtherCAT bus systems. Automated control systems usually require high availability of the whole system. Due to the rough industrial environment this is often hardly to achieve. Possible reasons for failure are:

• bad cables or plugs
• vibrations
• system degradation (temperature, oxidation, mechanic failure, …)
• electromagnetic fields (EMV)

If high availability shall be guaranteed for a automated control system it is important to verify and maintain the field bus. Using EC-Lyser it is possible to take a look into the "health" of the EtherCAT system. Detection of signs of system degradation prior to running into a system failure will be of great benefit. In that case it is possible to exchange the problematic components (cables, slave devices).

Many aspects of diagnosis are covered by the EC-Lyser:

• Useful for setting up the system
• System analyzation and maintenance
• Error detection
• Documentation

Highlights

• Graphical network topology display
• General information like device name, EtherCAT address, Product Code, Revision etc. of the EtherCAT Slaves
• Master informationen like „Master-State“, number of sent frames, number of lost frames
• Monitor process data inputs and outputs variables
• For documentation purposes it is possible to create a snapshot of the current EtherCAT network
• All available error counters (e.g. number of corruptly received Ethernet frames)
• All data required will be uploaded from the EtherCAT Master Stack (EC-Master). No project file required