New update on STMBL

What would it take to get the drive ethercat enabled with either microchip lan9252b or with beckhoff ek1100 as an add-on?

Would there be enough interest to take on this sort of a project?

I know that lan9252b is available in a QFP form factor but it may not be the best for a servo drive for throughput over SPI.

Would be great to hear opinions..

- automata

Yes this board works 230vac rectified, so 325vdc. Going to 600vdc I think would require major modification, and I didn't had the time to speculate much on it.
I'm currently controlling an old ABB irb6400 robotic arm, it used to have an isolation transformer and a simple rectifier, so 300vdc is more than sufficient for these motors.
I can assemble, flash and ship some boards to who is interested. There's a contact link in the repo readme.
The board is opensource, so is definitely possible to change connectors ecc, but it have to be safe and practical, if you have ideas you can open a discussion on github.

Regarding a possible ethercat addition. I have made a custom ethercat board with lan9252 and that is definitely doable. Started a year ago and it's all here github.com/MetalMusings/MyOwnEtherCATDevice

Answering automata and Hankan, it's a nice idea, but I need to investigate more, my experience with Ethercat is limited. I'm not the main firmware developer, I only touched some part of the code in order to accomodate the hardware changes.
I'll start the documentation soon and I'll look in the source code anyway...
I would like to improve this board since I couldn't find any other open source alternatives.

You can contact me via the github page if you like me to guide you on the ethercat thing.
You find a working Kicad schematics in the github files. Hardware interface is SPI (4 wires),
3 interrupt lines and perhaps one reset line. In software you need to respond on interrupts
every 1 ms (typically) by reading pdo data, do the things you need to do, and write pdo data
takes about 100 usecs or therearound. A cia402 implementation is a bit more with the state
machine, it's all in software though.

 

I feel that making this as an EtherCAT slave might open something of a licensing can of worms. But it already has Ethernet port for command input, and I would expect the STM32 to have the CPU horesepower to handle the protocol.

But note also that the previous STMBL works brilliantly with LinuxCNC and Mesa smart-serial with no additonal drivers or software needed. It's so simple it feels like you have missed something:

github.com/freakontrol/stmbl/blob/main/d...nuxcnc/stmbl.hal#L15