docs: link ecal-mcp (MCP server exposing eCAL to LLM clients)

[zpg6]

ecal-mcp is a local MCP server that exposes eCAL to LLM clients (Cursor, Claude Desktop, etc.). It's a single native Rust binary built on rustecal and the official rmcp SDK — it joins the eCAL network on the host like any other participant. No daemons, no sidecars.

It exposes the eCAL monitoring/pub-sub/service surface as MCP tools so an LLM agent can:

• diagnose why a topic isn't behaving (ecal_diagnose_topic — combines a monitoring snapshot with a live measurement window and emits structured findings: missing publisher/subscriber, type-signature mismatch, no shared transport, cross-host SHM-domain split, ongoing drops, unhealthy producer process)
• measure actual on-the-wire rate / payload size / inter-arrival jitter (ecal_topic_stats)
• list publishers / subscribers / services / service clients / processes with substring filtering
• drain eCAL log messages with level / time / process filters
• one-shot publish + windowed subscribe + call services on every discovered replica (or a specific one by server_entity_id)

Prebuilt Linux x86_64 / aarch64 + Windows x86_64 binaries are released on GitHub with .sha256 files and one-line install scripts.

Test coverage spans two Docker-based e2e testing "tiers": 30 single-host SHM cases, plus 15 cross-container cases on a 4-host topology in network mode + TCP (cross-host transport negotiation, real protobuf FileDescriptorSet round-tripping, multi-publisher / multi-subscriber listing, mixed-role host attribution).

Ask

I'd love feedback from the eCAL maintainers — both on the link itself and (more importantly) on the tool. If anyone is willing to point it at a real deployment and tell me what's missing or wrong, I'd really appreciate it. Issues / discussion welcome at https://github.com/zpg6/ecal-mcp.

... until then I'll leave this here as a draft :)

[KerstinKeller]

Hi 😄
thanks for opening this PR. The idea of having an MCP server sounds really fun.
How did you usually run it? In a VS Code / Visual Studio environment?

We often have to do troubleshooting, and an MCP server would certainly help with that, although i suspect we would need to buid in a bit more functionality in order to use it productively. But I think it would be a great starting point.

Also there are a few things that I would tweak also:
E.g. not relying on a preinstalled eCAL Version and rather deploying it with eCAL Shared libraries (we only guarantee binary compatibility across patch releases, and in such a case I would prefer that an application provides its dependencies with it)

[zpg6]

Hi 😄

thanks for opening this PR. The idea of having an MCP server sounds really fun.

How did you usually run it? In a VS Code / Visual Studio environment?

We often have to do troubleshooting, and an MCP server would certainly help with that, although i suspect we would need to buid in a bit more functionality in order to use it productively. But I think it would be a great starting point.

Also there are a few things that I would tweak also:

E.g. not relying on a preinstalled eCAL Version and rather deploying it with eCAL Shared libraries (we only guarantee binary compatibility across patch releases, and in such a case I would prefer that an application provides its dependencies with it)

Hi @KerstinKeller !

I've only tested this with Cursor so far, and I'm new to eCAL so I don't have a ton of networks to test with. If there's a good kitchen sink example that's quite complicated please share!

There's some "eCAL puzzles" I asked agents to solve using the MCP server, I optimized from avg 5-6 tool calls down to 2-3 using many rounds where LLMs used the tools and gave retrospective how they could be better.

Will look into using the shared libraries!

[rex-schilasky]

Really interesting new extension! For marketing reasons I will then rename rustecal to rustecalAI. 😉