The ethercat crate
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.