6.8. Operation without ENI

The EC-Monitor can operate on a reduced feature set without an ENI file. This is particularly useful in cases where an ENI file is unavailable or inaccessible. To operate the EC-Monitor in this mode, configure the network using the eCnfType_GenEBI configuration type.

In this mode, the EC-Monitor is able to observe basic information on the bus such as the network topology, slave descriptions and registers. The application can retrieve this information using emonGetBusSlaveInfo and emonReadSlaveRegister respectively. Because the EC-Monitor does not store or access EtherCAT^® Slave Information (ESI) files, it does not have a process data image, and APIs which depend on configuration data will be limited or non-functional.

The EC-Monitor supports exporting an ENI Builder (*.ebi) configuration file. This file contains the observed network topology and slave descriptions and can be imported in the acontis EC-Engineer, which can export an ENI file in turn. This ENI file can then be used to operate the EC-Monitor on its full feature set.

See also

• emonConfigureNetwork

• emonExportEniBuilderConfig