I am new to the low-level side of Ethercat, so I may be making some bad assumptions, but there’s no better way to learn than asking people with experience.
I’m interested in the Devicenet Scanner to Ethercat Slave bridge to help implement communication to a Devicenet network with some 20-odd devices. My Ethercat Master is going to be an NI CompactRIO though, not a traditional PLC. With other Ethercat devices I’ve used on this platform in the past, the device identifier XML file contains mappings for the process data (PDO’s). These will then show up in the NI LabVIEW project view which allows them to be accessed by the software. I don’t see any way to access PDO’s programatically except through this abstraction layer (SDOs and object dictionary, yes, but not PDOs)
However, the downloadable file for the Anybus gateway doesn’t contain any PDOs (which makes some sense given the PDOs would be entirely dependent on what was being mirrored across the gateway).
My question is if there is a way that the configurator program would generate a fleshed out XML file that contained the PDO endpoints?
I saw a post from about a year ago that mentioned the EtherCAT ESI Generator tool, but I don’t see any options within that tool to define PDOs.
Thanks for any help,
Mike