New Berlin, Wis. – ABB Low Voltage Drives announces the release of the FECA-01 EtherCAT^® Adapter for the ACS355 and ACS850 drives. The FECA-01 supports CANopen over EtherCAT (CoE) protocol.

The flexible plug-in adapter provides fast and simple connectivity to the ABB AC500 PLC (programmable logic controller), and all other major programmable automation controllers / interfaces that support the EtherCAT protocol. Applications include packaging machines, high-speed presses, injection molding machines, woodworking machines, machine tooling (CNC), test beds, robotics, materials handling / logistics, and high speed bottling lines (food and beverage) among others.

EtherCAT is a real-time Ethernet technology which aims to maximize the use of the full duplex Ethernet bandwidth. It overcomes the overhead normally associated with Ethernet via employing “on the fly” processing hardware. An EtherCAT bus consists of a master system and up to 65535 slave devices, connected together with standard Ethernet cabling. The slave devices process the incoming data directly, extract or insert relevant data, and transfer the message to the next EtherCAT slave device, making a loop.

There are several protocols that can be used as the application layer. In the CANopen over EtherCAT (CoE) technology, the CANopen protocol is applied to EtherCAT. By combining this high speed / data infused protocol with ABB’s feature enriched ACS355 and ACS850 drives, designers can develop robust solutions. This includes not only real-time control, but also the ability to extract real-time data to gain further optimization for applications.

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