Good morning.
I was thinking about preparing gateway between Serial data send from PC application prepared for example ticin OpenCV (library for machine Vision etc.). Why EtherCat gateway ? I'm interesting in industrial robot machine vision. My scope is on detection parts on for example convoyer and pick up part by robot. For this purpose we need to know where part is correctly on convoyer. For this we need to have camera with prepared application for recognizing element (his position and angle). On the market I was looking for Profinet solution because I can use robot by Kuka which is networked by Profinet. I never found it. But I had found EtherCat shield for Arduino Uno. Connection between shield and Arduino is prepared in SPI protocole. On the PC I have some application for Machine Vision "Roborealm". I was thinking about connection all of elements. Connection between Arduino and PC is prepared by normal COM4 port so I don't need to prepare any additional RS (PC<>Arduino). As we know Serial port is not time critical and doesn't have any sophisticated methods to verify that information which has send is readed. Maybe I'm wrong so please drop me some info how to prepared more safe version of Serial communication. In a nearest future I would like to mount Ethernet shield for Modbus TCP conection which give me sure that frame send has been received. If anybody wants to help me will be very kind of You.
Global working of my converter is shown on youtube movie. Sorry for my not proper English descriptions in movie.
if You have any questions or hints will be so pleasure to share with me.
Marek