Plans to use Vendor ID to identify EtherCAT devices?
Currently the EtherCAT package in ROS uses the slaves' Product IDs to identify the devices, and load the correct drivers. This works great when all of the devices are manufactured by a single vendor, but are there any plans to prevent Product ID collisions when multiple vendors make ROS compatible EtherCAT devices?
We manufacture our own EtherCAT devices, and are just using some large values for Product ID, just hoping that these don't collide with anyone else's. Ideally, ROS would concatenate the vendor and product IDs into a single 64-bit value, and use that to identify the correct driver.
To what Ethercat package are you referring?
@sedwards - I don't know what it's called. I work down at the hardware / firmware end of the bus, and am not familiar with the names of things in ROS. It's the EtherCAT master library 1kHz realtime loop thing that handles all of the EtherCAT slaves: detecting them & loading the appropriate drivers.
There is another option: http://ros.org/wiki/Industrial/Tutorials/Simple_EtherCAT_Network_IO. It's my understanding that the PR2 ethercat drivers aren't being developed anymore, although anybody could take them up.