Industrial Ethernet / Ethercat
ETG expands 'Conformance Test Tool'
The Technical Working Group Conformance of the Ethercat Technology Group (ETG) has released version 2.0 of its Conformance Test Tool (CTT) and with it a significantly expanded test set for Ethercat devices.
The Ethercat Conformance Test Tool has been the official reference for the specification-compliant implementation of Ethercat technology in slave devices since 2008. With the update to version 2.0, central extensions are now available. These include the ESI Editor, which can be used to edit the device description file, SII Control, which generates the EEPROM content, and additional functions such as the option to upload the object directory from the device and save it for the ESI.
Alongside the enhancements in the new version, the test coverage has also been systematically increased, resulting in a significantly higher number of test cases. CTT 2.0 also supports the operation of devices in high-precision synchronization mode (distributed clocks), so that these can now also be tested fully automatically. Furthermore, any number of different configurations can be created for a slave in a project - even automatically. This should enable developers to test devices quickly and easily in all available configurations. The test results themselves can be exported to Microsoft Excel or the .csv file format for documentation purposes.
The test logic and thus the tests themselves are defined and released by a special working group within the Ethercat Technology Group. The pure test software of the CTT, which executes the logic defined in the tests and evaluates the behavior of the devices based on the specified logic, is developed and maintained by Beckhoff Automation.
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