EtherLab^®

The name EtherLab stands for an open-source solution for automation and test purposes including Matlab/Simulink and EtherCAT support. Below is a short summary of what EtherLab is capable of:

• Realtime execution of multiple applications consisting of multiple tasks with signals and parameters.
• Accessing the applications' signals and parameters via TCP/IP. There is a generic C++ library called PdCom and many tools for visualisation, data logging, etc. available from here.
• Creation of realtime applications with a generic C-API.
• Creation of realtime applications using MATLAB/Simulink and the EtherLab blockset.

The EtherLab package can be subdivided into the components listed below:

• The realtime application core (represented by the Linux kernel module rt_appcore), that is responsible for the execution of the realtime applications. It manages the applications tasks, signals and parameters.
• The buddy process, acting as a userspace counterpart to the application core. It maintains internal representations of the loaded applications and is responsible for presenting signals and parameters via TCP/IP. Each application is accessible via an own TCP port.
• The EtherLab C-API, that is used to create realtime applications, basically consisting of tasks, signals and parameters. The C-API provides a generic way to describe applications using an EtherLab realtime application description XML file that is a source for the application's data structures and the appropriate information for the buddy process, that is necessary for presenting the data.
• The MATLAB/Simulink integration of EtherLab in terms of the etherlab_lib for Simulink (containing all necessary blocks) and the EtherLab target for the Real-Time Workshop, that is able to create EtherLab applications from Simulink models.

Repository Access

The Mercurial repository of EtherLab is hosted on SourceForge. The following command can be used to clone the repository in order to get the latest revisions:

hg clone http://etherlab.hg.sourceforge.net:8000/hgroot/etherlab/etherlab etherlab-hg

Please note that the default branch is selected after cloning, which contains the development version. For changing into another branch (for example stable-1.3) please use the following command:

hg update stable-1.3

The repository can also be browsed online.

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