Libfakeethercat is a userspace library which has the same API as the EtherCAT master interface library libethercat. Libfakeethercat can be used to spin up your RT application in a dry-run mode, without any master configured or slaves attached. Furthermore, it is possible to emulate EtherCAT slaves on process data level by running two applications back to back.

Currently, only a very limited subset of libethercat functionality is supported:

Creating master and domain instances
Activating master, send/receive.
Processing and queuing domains
Configuring PDOs
Configuring SDOs using ecrt_slave_config_sdo*

The SDO config does not do anything, but when activating the master the SDO config will be dumped into a JSON file.

ecrt_master_state() and ecrt_domain_state() both return states as if the bus works without errors. So currenty, a bus error cannot be simulated.

RtIPC is needed. Simply pass --enable-fakeuserlib to your ./configure call and the library will be built for you.

To avoid recompiling your application, we will use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to load libfakeethercat instead of libethercat.

# pick a location for an empty directory
export MY_LIB_LOCATION=$HOME/fake_lib64
# create that directory
mkdir -p $MY_LIB_LOCATION
# create a symlink to libfakeethercat
# assuming SOVERSION is 1
# debian users, please use /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfakeethercat.so.1
ln -s /usr/lib64/libfakeethercat.so.1 $MY_LIB_LOCATION/libethercat.so.1
# use MY_LIB_LOCATION to load libraries first
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MY_LIB_LOCATION
# check whether everything is done right
ldd my_application | grep ethercat
    libethercat.so.1 => /home/vh/fake_lib64/libethercat.so.1 (0x00007fa5a5c59000)

RtIPC needs a place to store its configuration. Set FAKE_EC_HOMEDIR environment variabe to a path to an empty directory, for instance /tmp/FakeEtherCAT. FAKE_EC_NAME can be set to a useful name of your application, default is FakeEtherCAT.

export FAKE_EC_HOMEDIR=/tmp/FakeEtherCAT
rm -rf $FAKE_EC_HOMEDIR
mkdir -p $FAKE_EC_HOMEDIR

Now it's time to simply launch your application. You will notice that the PDO configuration will be dumped at stderr. The path displayed is the path of the RtIPC variable in the following format: $FAKE_EC_PREFIX/$MASTER_ID/$DOMAIN_ID/$ALIAS$POSITION/$PDO.

Let's say you'd like to build virtual EtherCAT slaves to emulate your field. Libfakeethercat makes that possible with the help of RtIPC.

Your field emulator simply has to swap the sync manager direction setting (EC_DIR_INPUT and EC_DIR_OUTPUT) in ec_sync_info_t. Libfakeethercat instances use shared memory, provided by RtIPC, to exchange process data. The direction setting decides which instance writes and which reads from shared memory.

For instance, emulating a digital output works in the following way: Create another real time application with the same slave information as your control application. Then, replace all EC_DIR_INPUT with EC_DIR_OUTPUT and vice versa. Now, remember to read process data instead of writing it, and vice versa. So, your EL2004 digital out will be read by your simulating application and has PDO object 0x1600 ff. configured with Sync Manager 2 as EC_DIR_INPUT.

EtherLab provides a convenient way to build an entire simulator using SIMULINK since Version 2.4.0. Run ‘web(etherlab_help_path('swap_io.html’), '-helpbrowser')` in your MATLAB shell to read more about how to set up a Process Data simulator.

First, do all the steps explained above to run your control application in dry run mode. Then, in another shell, do the same thing with your simulator, but do not remove the FAKE_EC_HOMEDIR directory and pick another FAKE_EC_NAME.

Carefully watch the PDO configuration on stderr and compare them. All paths configured as Output on the control application have to be configured as Input on your simulator and vice versa. If you use multiple domains and there is a mismatch of the domain IDs, set FAKE_EC_DOMAIN_PERMUTATION to a space-separated list of integers to permutate the domain IDs of one application. FAKE_EC_DOMAIN_PERMUTATION="0 1" swaps domains 0 and 1, for instance.

Finally, your control application needs to be restarted so it can find the RtIPC variables which contains the process data of the simulator.

FAKE_EC_DOMAIN_PERMUTATION: Permutate the domain IDs, useful to match control and simulation applications.
FAKE_EC_HOMEDIR: Directory for RtIPC builletin board and SDO json files
FAKE_EC_NAME: Will be used for naming RtIPC config and SDO json file
FAKE_EC_PREFIX: Prefix for RtIPC variables, useful to run multiple simulators side by side.