Our small company is, for the first time, acquiring EtherCAT driven hardware to go in our product. As I start reading messages on these boards, it seems that people are using special controllers as the EtherCAT master. Oh really? So my question is, is it possible to drive EtherCAT from an ordinary ethernet port, such as one might find in a laptop, provided that port is dedicated to this and no other use? Is it feasible to drive EtherCAT from a laptop at all? Or do we need special hardware on the computer end?