EtherCAT from Mesa?

Guessing this is a question for PCW.. Is there any plan on making a EtherCAT master board in the same FPGA manner we are so much loving, but that can talk to an EtherCAT bus??

Mainly cuz there is alot of cheap ethercat servo drivers available on the market now both from china and as "spares" from european manufacturers. But seems to be a bit clunky to get working with LCNC atm.

I've considered it and even made a prototype card (7I62) a number of years ago, but its not something I have a great deal of interest in currently.

Ah sorry to hear.

Seems like the future to me for servo based solutions at least.

Yes, its going to be a common choice for newer high end systems, but those systems typically dont need FPGA flexible I/O, since all required I/O is built into the drives...

You are prob right. But i would think the flexible IO would come in handy for other things tho, toolchangers, quadrature encoders and so on when you wanna convert an old Machine into these cheap chinese drives or even the Pronet ones that is quite affordable..

Wouldnt look at em as a high end system solution more as a "easy way of wiring" kind of solution.. Only hard part i have issues with finding is that first inerface the ethercat master.

So would there be any chance i could get my hands on the code for the prototype board you made?

I had a realization that ethercat for lcnc in its current state wouldnt have any hardware step generators or pwm signal generators, and to be honest that would be the biggest benefit of having a hostmot2 card as a ethercat master rather than the flexible IO part.. Even if the ethercat bus itself would be the flexible IO down the line.