Can ConnectCore 6UL be used as an EtherCAT master?

Embedded Devices Linux
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1

As part of a mobile robot design, we were considering using the ConnectCore 6UL as a central processing unit to control a number of motor drivers and other peripherals. Since EtherCAT is gaining popularity for such platform designs, I was wondering whether ConnectCore 6UL would be a candidate for such a design. I realize this might require customizing aspects of the Yocto installation, but I wanted to confirm that this at least sounds reasonable to those of you with more experience on this platform before we proceed with actual tests and attempts to implement such a solution.

Any comments/feedback as well as examples from existing solutions are welcome. Thank you!

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The real question is can EtherCat be implemented in Yocto as it requires true real-time. There is not much evidence of it online. The closest I’ve seen is in this thread:
https://community.nxp.com/thread/389786

3

That’s a very good point. Since there seem to be implementations of EtherCAT master stack for Linux, I had assumed that to be possible, but I had not considered implications of the non-real-time nature of the OS. Since the IGH master seem to operate without interupts, that might indeed be a problem.