Servo homing

Hi,

I'm looking to see if anyone has any ideas of how to best integrate the inbuilt homing cycle of my servo drives into linuxcnc?

As an experiment to give me maximum performance at minimum cost I am running chinese CANopen drives in velocity mode (standard CiA402 profile), bridged to LinuxCNC via an ethercat board of my own design.

The actual motion control side of things works beautifully, with a nice low following error, and the absolute encoders mean that the drives retain their position regardless of power status. I can also easily switch the drives into homing mode & command a homing cycle via ethercat., which is highly repeatable due to the use of both limit switches & an encoder index mark.

However for the life of me I can't figure out the best way of integrating the inbuilt homing cycle of the drives into LinuxCNC - there are a couple of vague posts alluding to people having done this, but I'm struggling to follow what has been done amongst all the other noise in 100+ page forum threads.

Classic ladder, modifying homing.c & other options have all been discussed - but I don't know if this is already a solved problem? I'd be amazed if no reliable solution to homing servo drives already exists!

Cheers,
Paul

Thanks Andy - this is pretty much what I'm doing at the moment to be honest.
I just wondered if there was a way I could integrate it better, as I do periodically re-home to check things & it's a bit painful how I have things set up.