Ethercat retrofit question

Does anybody here have an active membership in ethercat.org ?
I'd like to contact the manufacturer of my drive . It's been months since I sent them an email and still nothing . My hope is to find someone knowledgable in these drives on their side .

OK, major success today . With the aid of siitool, hex editor and the bin from one of the other drives I managed to cobble together a valid bin file and flash the spindle drive with it .
All that's left is to initialise the control panel .

With the spindle running, all that's left is to find a good way to home it before tool-changing and figuring out the DC parameters to smooth out motion .
How is spindle homing usually handled in ethercat drives ?
I see no index pulse, and every time it's powered up it counts from a relative position .
Cheers

So the machine works mostly nice . But sometimes it gets really noisy . Must be something related to DC sync . Here are my settings :
<master idx="0" appTimePeriod="1000000" refClockSyncCycles="100">
slaves 2-6
<dcConf assignActivate="300" sync0Cycle="*1" sync0Shift="0"/>
The function of refClockSyncCycles and appTimePeriod is clear . But what do the parameters in the slave section do ?
Also, sometimes it just leaves OP state while the machine is idle, and dmesg records PLL errors .

Edit : that noise is seen as spikes in f-error .

this pll errors are often related to jitter on the main_thread or by the network card.

Are you using the generic etherlab driver for the network card, in the past i had mostly troubles with rt8169 chip.

One way to solve this, could be to clock the lcnc task to the ethercat devices.
This could be done by setting refClockSyncCycles to "-1" but for this you would have to use the lcnc master version, or you would have to install an patch to an RIP 2.8 Version.

Search in the forum for "add-task-pll-functions", i have described this a few times.

So this PLL patch is installed in the lcec_ec_master in you repo right ?
Also found the "add-task-pll-functions" in sittner's linuxcnc-ethercat repo .
Is that patch used for the kernel or the driver ?

Hi,

no, the lcec_ec_master in my repo is only an deb file with the ethercat master + special functions eoe, sii overwrite etc...

the patch in sittner linuxcnc-ethercat repo is the right one.

this patch has to be applied to linuxcnc/src and then linuxcnc has to be compiled again.
This patchs makes changes to the rtapi part of linuxcnc.

If you use 2.9 (master) then the patch is already in linuxcnc...

OK . I taught the kernel needed recompiling .
So it's just a case of building 2.9 from git .

So I upgraded to 2.9 but the pll errors persist .
I also checked the ethernet controller and it's an intel i211 .
Is there a more appropriate driver for this ? Currently I'm running the generic one .
Also can I test jitter while the CNC is running and how can it be minimised ?

did you change refClockSyncCycles in the ethercat-conf.xml to "-1" ?