Custom EtherCAT device

Interesting.. A votage to frequency converter. I fix CNC plasma machines at work and no technology like this is used. Only voltage to voltage isolators. The older machines have an independant height control ( IHT ). And the newer have everything integrated. But the isolators are still the same.
No I didn't try anything out, we have some birthdays this weekend so maybe I can do a little bit in the evening. But still thank you for the example XML
I was looking in the LinuxCNC docs for different data taypes. S32,REAL,.... Is there any oher datatype? S16 or S8,... And unsigned versions?

I am interested to hear your progress.

I'm also keen for better and cheaper ethercat IO options.

I did just come across www.mikroe.com/ethercat-click for the first time (which I searched LAN9252). Have not come across it before in many searches for the cheapest way to get ethercat / ethercat for MCU

This is Linuxcnc!

QTplasmac should hold its own against your integrated systems, possibly exceed. The $70 Mesa THCAD2/5/10's  are built for the dirty plasma environment and can handle 500 volt over voltage indefinitely. They are individually calibrated and are connected to an encoder input on a  Mesa card. Linuxcnc converts the frequency in software and controls the torch height internally.
Here is a walkthrough I did

And the cut recovery features


Data types are described in the docs here  linuxcnc.org/docs/2.9/html/hal/comp.html

• TYPE - One of the HAL types: bit, signed, unsigned, or float. The old names s32 and u32 may also be used, but signed and unsigned are preferred.

I think the xml uses S32 and and U32


 

The ethercat click is the same thing as mine. But this one seems to use only one port.. Ethercat that i have seen uses two so you can dasy chain them together. You could use a switch to connect them, but the default topology is dasy chaining.. Also these slaves don't use any addressing, the physical position in the chain provides the "address"

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

Tady wrote:

Interesting.. A votage to frequency converter. I fix CNC plasma machines at work and no technology like this is used. Only voltage to voltage isolators. 

V to F is an effective way to interface an analogue signal with the digital control system. There are other ways to do it, but as most LinuxCNC systems have the possibility to count encoder pulses, and not all have any analogue input capability, it's a sensible choice.