The ethercat crate

Documentation

About

The ethercat crate provides a Rust wrapper for the IgH/Etherlab EtherCAT Master for Linux.

EtherCAT is an Ethernet-based fieldbus system, originally invented by Beckhoff GmbH but now used by numerous providers of automation related hardware. The IgH master lets you provide an EtherCAT master on a Linux machine without specialized hardware.

Building

In order to build the raw wrapper crate ethercat-sys, you need to set the environment variable ETHERCAT_PATH to the location of a checkout of the IgH Etherlab repository, after running configure there.

• The minimum tested Rust version is 1.34.2.
• The recommended EtherCAT source is: http://hg.code.sf.net/p/etherlabmaster/code
• The recommended Revision is 334c34cfd2e5

Licensing

The Etherlab master is licensed under the GPLv2, and provides Linux kernel modules and a userspace library, with an ioctl based interface. This crate does not use the userspace library (which is a simple wrapper around the ioctls anyway) but rather communicates with the kernel modules through the raw ioctls.

Therefore, we believe that the crate does not need to be GPLv2-licensed, and are using the dual MIT/Apache-2 license commonly used for Rust crates.