This manual describes the application interface of the EtherCAT Slave Protocol Stack. The intention of it is to help the interested developer to use this interface and implement application tasks using this stack. The application task will be called AP-Task in the following chapters.
The development of the stack is based on the Hilscher’s Task Layer Reference Programming Model. It is a specification of how to develop a task in general, which is a convention defining a combination of appropriate functions belonging to the same task. Furthermore, It defines how different tasks have to communicate together in order to exchange their data. The Reference Model is commonly used by all developers at Hilscher and shall be used by you as well when writing your application task on top of
the stack.