Industrielle Linux CNC 5achs Fräsmaschine

In my opinion, Ethercat is a great solution for small machines that can use integrated drives.
I have mills where the individual axes are connected to the rest of the machine via a one patch cord and one power cord, and things like homing limit switches  or other sensors are connected locally to additional drive inputs.
Such a machine is simple to wire and, in my opinion, more reliable.
However, if all the control is to be located in one cabinet and long and multi-core cables are to be run, Ethercat loses its advantages for now. It's just expensive and difficult to set up, and what's best about it becomes secondary...

tuxcnc wrote:

In my opinion, Ethercat is a great solution for small machines that can use integrated drives.
I have mills where the individual axes are connected to the rest of the machine via a one patch cord and one power cord, and things like homing limit switches  or other sensors are connected locally to additional drive inputs.
Such a machine is simple to wire and, in my opinion, more reliable.
However, if all the control is to be located in one cabinet and long and multi-core cables are to be run, Ethercat loses its advantages for now. It's just expensive and difficult to set up, and what's best about it becomes secondary...

Nonsense. ethercat drives whole factories. The advantages of ethercat remain regardless of the size of the machine. Ethercat should be a more efficient protocol than mesa hm2 so it should have more efficient bandwidth utilisation. Linuxcnc won't care if you use mesa or ethercat

 

rodw wrote:

We don't talk about what is used in industry and why. We are talking about using Ethercat in a machine controlled by LinuxCNC. And here we have factors such as the availability and quality of documentation, sample configurations, or tools, and here Ethercat loses to Mesa. Therefore, I believe that unless there are compelling arguments for Ethercat, it is better to use Mesa. 
"Ethercat is faster" is not a valid argument, because anything that is faster than the required minimum will be sufficient.

tuxcnc wrote:

"Ethercat is faster" is not a valid argument,...

He did not say "faster", he said more efficient, and even that does not seem correct to me from what i read around here, no experience with ethercat yet except rare services of machines using them.
I am intentionally refusing to use ethercat until something is done to have proper feedback, so far it does not work or it does work with big delays.
But, i would really like to have the redundancy it may offer, for now only in showrooms.

I don't have much experience with Ethercat.
I simply had a milling machine frame without drives and I was curious if I could handle it.
I ordered integrated Lichuan drives and managed to configure the machine.
It wasn't easy, but the first time never is...
Since it worked really nicely, I decided to convert a second milling machine, basically identical, only slightly larger, so apart from a few numbers in the ini file, it should work with the same configuration.
I bought identical drives, connected them identically, ran LinuxCNC with the configuration from the first one and basically everything worked, except the motors did not rotate...
I wasted a lot of time before it turned out that I had to write the same thing in the xml file, only in a different order.
The manufacturer probably improved something, and that's how it ended.
Since then, I have been very cautious about recommending Ethercat to someone who has never used it before.
I really like Ethercat, but for now there are too many problems with it.
It will probably get better with time.

Ok, so for the first test I will use a mesa card, since I don't want to mess with the original motor drives. However if we decide to use Linux CNC multiple machines may be converted, therefore the hassle implementing ethercat is valid. Am I right when looking for a PC that has a Intel nic and 8th gen i5? Is Linux CNC able to do collision detection of the machine gcode?