Compiling realtime kernel

Great work!

Tady wrote:

Rodw that was it
This ethercat stuff is awsome. Now I need a drive to play with positioning

I am using the rtelligent etc60 and etc86 from aliexpress. They are quite well priced.
I did find the hard way that you can't use a nema23/24 drive on the etc86 driver.
I've still got a way to go to sort out internal homing but I have to get my motors installed before I can test this out properly.

You could just buy the etc60 drive and play with a open loop motor but closed loop is half the fun!

What do you mean you cant use nema23???
I saw those drives.. Very cheap
A few years a go I was fooling around with eth2hm (i think) driver that is included in linuxcnc from mesa.
I changed alot of code and made a firmware for a stm32f767zi nucleo board over UDP. The thing worked quite well

I wanted to standardise on the ETC86 (for 86mm NEMA34's) because they accept AC power and had planned to use an existing 60V AC toroid.
I assumed I could run a NEMA 23 on the larger drive and use a open loop motor but in practice I could never get smooth motion despite getting some tuning settings from the manufacturer. Motion was very rough at slow speeds

As soon as I put an Open Loop Nema34 on it, motion was silky smooth.

How about if you add an encoder to nema23. Would that improve the system?
I don't like using AC transformers. They need very large smoothing capacitors. The drives have them built in but I doubt they are large enough.
Try a Nema23 and a switching power supply with a lower voltage

I don't think a encoder helps as a mate has had similar issues with the same drives.
Anyway its solved now. I have a Nema34 motor mount to install today  
I had the toroid manufactured to my specs for another drive (Lam Technologies) so wanted to use it. I did think of using a switch mode power supply but the one I have is only 48 volts and I wanted a bit more than this. Rectifying the voltage to DC would be too high for the ETC60

I think the quality of drives is shown up by using an AC power supply. The Lams have a seperate part number for AC capable drives so are built to handle it. Initially I was going to use Lams. They are open loop but their boost feature allows much higher performance than normal because you can reduce the current when cruising at constant velocity to let the motors cool.

tommylight wrote:

You have a Mesa 7i76E that has two free headers with 17 usable IO each, so attaching encoders there works like a charm.
Much harder to do = add encoders to stepper motors with a single shaft !

But I remembered I tried this drive (ECT86) with a closed loop stepper as well as an open loop. For now it will be an Open loop NEMA34. I'm wiring it up now but eventually, it will be closed loop NEMA34.

Did anyone try to read an inout of a EL1809 card from terminal?
ethercat reg_read...
Or turn on an output of a EL2809?

Figured it out
- ethercat reg_read -p 2 -t uint32 0x1000 0xf