the holy grail...

Sorry I've had my head down for a while both at work and with ethercat.
My instructions were really to guide experienced users familar with installing linuxcnc from source and to pull info together from various sources.
They were never designed to be blow by blow instructions on how to install and run Linuxcnc. That is covered elsewhere.
I do see there is room for improvement as I did not cover how to build and install the linuxcnc debs. I should have as I use them.
The instructions I wrote certainly work with Debian Buster.

I made the mistake of trying to install ethercat on Debian 11 (Bullseye) but that is not possible using the ec_debianize approach. 
Fortunately, Grotius built a deb for me that eventually worked with additional modifications after it ran. More specifically it needed the folder containing libethercat.so.1 to be able to be found by the linker. More info here forum.linuxcnc.org/ethercat/44969-can-t-...er-deb-file?start=20

I still need to sort out the auto start on bootup. During that process, I found that the etherlab guys now have a buildbot that is building deb files for debian. It would be nice if a new build process was documented based on these but I don't have a PC spare to give it a try.

But today, I finally have a milling machine with 3 axis moving with ethercat drives so I will continue to perservere.

All I Will say it is not for the faint hearted or inexperienced.

I'm not convinced the cia402 component is bug free. Home velocity follows latch velocity, not the internal drive velocity and lcnc can even override the homing direction so that is not right. I have done some work on that. Now I have a couple of axes working I can experiment with that.

Hopefully, we will converge on the solution....

 

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipOXuKMAiUl_3dyOeuQ562Me49VImoJFY-5H1J78like everyone I've been busy with boring work things... 

but I've uploaded some pictures of the ethercat cabling, and you might be able to see that we have is a HP pc which has 2 network cards, the onboard, and one in a slot..

the cables, are from the onboard nic, to the beckhoff, and then out of the beckhoff to the savch drive, 

but i've just swapped the cables around, so now we have the Savch and then the beckhoff and all the items seem to be on the same bus ID

i'll screenshot from the linuxcnc pc in the next post... 
 
 

here is the Ethercat slaves response now I've replugged everything..

0  1:0  PREOP  +  Savch SDA2-E(CoE) Drive Rev1.3
1  1:1  PREOP  +  EK1100 EtherCAT-Koppler (2A E-Bus)
2  1:2  PREOP  +  EL1008 8K. Dig. Eingang 24V, 3ms
3  1:3  PREOP  +  EL2004 4K. Dig. Ausgang 24V, 0.5A
4  1:4  PREOP  +  EL2004 4K. Dig. Ausgang 24V, 0.5A
 

this is now, how it should look like....

strange is the old behaviour...

You now have to change the order in your ethercat_conf.xml and try again.

Great to see progress. 
I had a regression today as slave 1 on the  Y axis stopped moving. It must be the config because if I swap the order of the drives on the ethernet chain (swapped slave 0 with 1), it works perfectly if its drive 0, then the other drive fails. I don't believe I changed anything in my config.I printed out all the config files and ticked off line by line and I could not find anything. What I see is the joint.1.pos-cmd is not moving and I thought it should. Tomorrow I was going to do a lot of  cut and paste but if anybody has some ideas, let me know.

Also note to others. If using a cia402 drive with additional I/O pins, be sure NOT to use one as a general input but leave the input type as estop. No wonder nothing worked for a day or so! At least I found it with my checkoff.
 

@rodw

did you mean, that only one the first drive in the ethercat chain is working?

If this is true, then there is a problem with the pdo offset. do carefully check the bitsize of all pdos and compare them with the mapped pdos inside the drive.

there are 3 identical drives in the chain. The middle one in the XML is not working. I've confirmed its not a wiring or motor issue.
Odd it stopped for no reason without me touching the config.
I'll try a few things including connecting another PC with ethercat on it.

Fixed!, I isolated it to being something wrong in the INI file. as when I replaced it with an earlier version (on my github), it worked so I just went through and edited all the velocity, accelleration and travels. It may have been a silly value for FERROR

in my IT past we had a very simple mantra...
reboot, reboot, rebuild...

and today is the rebuild day ...

so ... i've got the ethercat bit working... but the bit that I'm now on is the linuxcnc-ethercat bit...

now using the forum.linuxcnc.org/ethercat/42048-notes-...aspberry-pi-4#203806
instructions as a starting point, (i'm creating a document as i go which i will totally share, as it actually seems to cut down on quite a bit of command line stuff when using the linuxcnc iso)

but i have a error...

if you look at the image you can see i'm trying to make the Linuxcnc-ethercat driver.... 

so ... whats wrong... 

Pb 

Hmm,

package missing. Install expath .

"sudo apt install libexpat1"