Tasks and cycle time
Process data is exchanged between master and slaves with cyclic EtherCAT frames; when the EtherCAT master works together with a PLC, they will be sent on the network syn- chronously with the Fast PLC task, so it is important to correctly configure the period of it:to do this, right-click on ”Tasks / Fast” in the ”Project” tab, choose ”Task configuration”, set ”Set period=Yes” and enter the desired period in milliseconds.
If the EtherCAT configurator is instead used stand-alone without a PLC, there will be an additional ”Tasks” tab where you can configure the ”Default cycle time” and optionally a list of cyclic tasks, that you can manually assign to SyncUnits to send different cyclic frames with different periods.Every EtherCAT slave on the network will exchange process data with an I/O cycle time that must be multiple of this base cycle time.
If the EtherCAT configurator is instead used stand-alone without a PLC, there will be an additional ”Tasks” tab where you can configure the ”Default cycle time” and optionally a list of cyclic tasks, that you can manually assign to SyncUnits to send different cyclic frames with different periods.Every EtherCAT slave on the network will exchange process data with an I/O cycle time that must be multiple of this base cycle time.