I am working on an industrial automation project and need to establish communication between my Engineering PC and a Beckhoff CX20x0 IPC using the EtherCAT protocol. I've set up the hardware connections and installed the necessary software, but I'm facing challenges in configuring the EtherCAT master and getting the devices to communicate.
The common way is to connect by TCP/IP as shown in the following picture:
but as we see in the CX20x0 manual we can see that the RJ45 supports EtherCAT.
What does it mean? and how can I connect my engineering PC to it by EtherCAT?
You should'nt and can't use EtherCAT to connect to your development environment. The only thing that the documentation says is that any of these network ports (X000, X001 in this case) can be used both for standard TCP/IP communication (non-RT, local or Internet) or for real-time communication (such as EtherCAT). What Beckhoff are referring to here is that a network adapter can be used as an EtherCAT-master (through a realtime driver running in kernel-mode), which is used to control your EtherCAT-devices.
Instead, you connect to the IPC/PLC through normal means using the AMS-router by adding a route to your PLC. You just have to make sure you have your IP-addresses set up correctly.