Ethercat HAL driver

Hello,

I'm currently developing a (new) Ethercat HAL driver based on IgH's EtherCAT-Master (see www.etherlab.org/de/ethercat/index.php).

The driver already supports some of the mainly used Beckhoff devices like digital and analouge I/O, encoder input and pulse train output
plus the Stöber MDS5000 series of servo drives (see www.stoeber.de/index_gb.html). The diver consists of a user space component
for configuration (masters & salves are configured via a xml file) and a RT component for the transfer/transformation of process data.
The structure of the driver makes it easy to add new devices. Distributed Clocks are supported.

I've also done a debian packet of the ethercat master for smooth integration.

I like to contribute but I don't know how. I've found a link 'Becoming a contributor' but unfortunately it's dead.
Should I publish a patch and some docs on the wiki?

Thank You & Kind Regdars

Sascha

yes just post to the wiki would be the best.

OK, thank you for the answers. I've decided to use github and have done a initial commit:

github.com/sittner/linuxcnc/compare/add-hal-ethercat

There are some cleanups and tests to be done and I will add some documentation
to the wiki. Please feel free to send me suggestions and hints.

Thanks for watching

The driver already supports some of the mainly used Beckhoff devices like digital and analouge I/O, encoder input and pulse train output

May you give me an idea of the price range of this products ?

Thanks you in advance,
VNR

If my memory dosn't lie the price range is like this:

buscoupler + bus terminal ~100 EUR
8ch digital in ~30 EUR
8ch digital out ~35 EUR
2ch 16 bit analog in ~160 EUR
2ch 16 bit analog out ~160 EUR
1ch pulse train (stepper) RS422 out ~160 EUR
2ch encoder input ~180 EUR

andypugh wrote:

Does your driver use RTNet? I noticed the other day that there is an option in RTAI to add RTNet support, but I am not sure if it is turned on by default in the LinuxCNC distributions.

No, it uses IgH's EtherCAT master. It's a driver for EtherCAT, not RTNet. The intension was to use a protocol that is
(relatively) open and where a good base of reasonable priced hardware is available. Fortunately the EthcerCAT
matser compiles fine with the version of RTAI that is included in the LinuxCNC distribution.

Has anyone tried this? I've got some Beckhoff modules I'd like to try out.

I'm following wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EtherCatDriver

I'm trying it on 10.04 as per livecd install

The file src/hal/drivers/ethercat/master/debian/configure is missing so the ethercat master cannot be built as a deb file. (as per the instructions)

When I install the ethercat master using 'normal' configure prefix=/usr, make, install, install_modules the linuxcnc build process cannot find ecrt.h (even though it seems to be in /usr/include)

I notice that in the debian build folder for the master the src/hal/drivers/ethercat/master/debian folder references ecrt.h in ethercat-dev.links.in presumably linking the header elsewhere for realtime components?

Sorry, it was my mistake. Files named "configure" are ignored by git by default and the repos is
not really maintained at the moment since I am very busy and community response for this
driver was very frugal.

We are using the driver in several machines.

I have commited the current development version to the repos now (including the missing script).
EtherCAT master is updated to 1.5.2 (wiki is fixed for this). There are some important fixes plus new
supported devices including a (currently not heavily testet) generic driver which allows simple
mapping of PDOs to HAL pins by the configuration xml.

The problem with ecrt.h in /usr/include is, that the kernel build system will not find it there.
So I softlinked it to /lib/modules/2.6.32-122-rtai/build/include.