Custom EtherCAT device

The pictures are a bit confusing. There are two ethernet ports - they are stacked vertically.

Sorry for the confusion... No pictures from the front.. It would be ilogical to make a one port slave. But its basically the same..

The V to F way seems the best if you can count pulses, it offers better noise immunity. But if you are already making a EtherCAT slave you could just use an optoisolator and an analog input an just read the register. I like to prototype stuff but I don't have a machine to use it on  .

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Today I was toying around with my slave. I made the XML file and installed lcec by your (rodw) instruction
Everytginh is ok ( LinuxCNC side), but I just can't get this darn thing to communicate. 
LinuxCNC show that slave is responding (lcec.0.all-op is ok) but lcec.0.0.slave-online and slave-state-init or or or anything for that matter is FALSE
Here are my files 

what does ethercat slaves say before opening linuxcnc and while its running? Please share
What happens if you click through the axis buttons to turn it on? what does it say then?

What is the output of ethercat pdos? Please share

Prefer it not to be in a rar file

I wanted to make a generic ethercat slave pcb back in -21 but got frustrated because of the component shortage and didn't have the time to finish it. My idea was to create a "base board" with LAN9252 and RPi2040 (pico) that you could attach different boards to it.

If someone wants to continue this, I can share the kicad files, its pretty much done but could be made a tad simpler by removing some extra power components etc. I think this is much more hobbyist friendly as caps etc are 0603 size, uses a cheap pico etc.
 

AX58400 looks very tasty but does not appear to be for sale (at least on western electronics sellers)
www.asix.com.tw/en/product/IndustrialEthernet/EtherCAT/AX58400

Yes the AX58400 is way better. For starters you can use DMA with SPI ...
That is a very nice design, why don't you continue now that the shortage is slowly ending?

I think my problem lies somwhere in the syncManager configuration. MY board is throwing watchdog timeouts. Everything else works. The RUN led for the LAN chip stops blinking and goes solid when the link is up
Is there ANY documentation on XML options and how to?

Welllll it works... Kind of... Everything is ok, i needed to change the vid and pid numbers. All XML files use #x(some number) but I changed to 0x(some number).
At first I tought that the #x is the indicator that the string is hex but it didn't parse. ethercat debug 1 and dmesg helped alot.
The only thing that is not working for me is the floating point number. I defined it my XML for lcec and my XML for TwinCAT. And I used TeinCAT to write the eeprom on my board.
The floating point is not correct its a bunch of random numbers that are displayed in HAL.
Ethercat xml returns my PODs as UINT32... So there is defenetly a ptoblem with my generated BIN file. But I'm at a loss on how to generate a correct one.. I even used the SII tool. But it's not working. If I generate it with SII the ethercat xml command returns without any PDOs????