The EasyCAT Shield and boards¶

• The EasyCAT Shield is an Arduino shield, designed and manufactured in Italy by AB&T Tecnologie Informatiche, that allow us to build a custom EtherCAT® slave in an easy way.

• This is the EasyCAT product page on the EtherCAT® Technology Group website.

• The EasyCAT Shield uses the 3x2 SPI connector to communicate with the microcontroller. This connector is standard on all the Arduino boards but some Arduino compatible boards don’t provide it. In this case, the SPI signal are always present on pins 13,12,and 11. Some examples of this boards are the STM32 Nucleo and the NXP LPCXpresso, part of the Mbed ecosystem.

• To address this issue in the EasyCAT Shield revision “C” there are three solder jumpers, on the bottom side of the board, that allow us to connect the SPI signals, SCK,MISO and MOSI, also on pins 13, 12 and 11.

• For your convenience the EasyCAT Shield can be ordered with the three solder jumpers already bridged and with the 3x2 connector not installed on the board. To request this option select EasyCAT spi_on_13_12_11 in the webshop.