Git update: 1.14.3

The forum editor keeps eating my formatted text, so I'll stick to a summary here; there's a longer version on Github .
There have been 30-some Git changes merged in the past 2 weeks, including a driver for the Delta ASDA-A3 and -B3 servo drives (thanks GuiHue!).  This has brought our total number of devices up to 241, from 217 in 1.7.0.

There has been a ton of documentation changes.  See linuxcnc-ethercat.github.io/linuxcnc-ethercat/ for an index.  There's some documentation of our XML format as well, although it's still somewhat incomplete.  The Delta ASDA, EL7041, and EL4xxx drivers all have new documentation that lists parameters, pins, and options.

There's also API documentation generated by Doxygen.  It's not complete, but it's much better than what we had before.

SDO setting should be much more reliable now; previously we didn't actually report errors at the time that we set SDOs, which made for weird experiences.  Buggy drivers that don't actually register the number of PDO entries that they declare will now produce runtime errors instead of silent failure.

Drivers for "digital combo" devices from Beckhoff (EL1252, EL185x, EK18xx, EP23xx, etc) have been merged and cleaned up quite a bit.

There is now standard library code for Beckhoff-style analog in and out channels, joining the digital in/out library code from a few weeks ago.  EL3xxx has been updated to use it, and EL4xxx drivers have been unified as well.

There's a new library for doing generic string->int or string->double mapping, which is useful for <modParam> handling.  It also has unit tests, which none of our code previously had.

Upcoming

There's work in flight now to create a framework for CiA 402 devices without using "generic".  In some cases, this will make device support more reliable.  Generic will continue to be available.  There's a RTelligent ECT60 driver in progress that uses the new CiA 402 code, and we'll look at creating drivers for other CiA 402 devices.  There's a bunch of digital in/out work going on under the hoods to make digital I/O on CiA 402 devices easier.

See Github for a longer list of upcoming projects and more details on everything.

Wow - one really needs to point out that this is entirely scottlaird's doing which is mighty impressive! Thank you!

Hi Scottlaird
you inserted the EasyIO in the lcec, (thanks) I tried to make it work but it gives an error:

 

I called it that in the .xml
" <slave idx="3" type="EasyIO" name="MixedI/O"> "

Maybe it's not correct or something is broken

Thank you very much

It core-dumped? Hmm. That's not good.

I'll look into it in a couple hours. It's not a very big driver, so it's probably not hard to find.

I think I found it. Or, at least I found *a* bug that would cause it to core dump. There could be others as well. It should be released as v1.14.3 momentarily.

Apparently we were only at 1.14.2 before, so I mis-named this whole thread .

It doesn't matter, really. Apparently I should have called it 'Git update: 1.14.2', but that's pretty much trivial, and it's now correct enough anyway.

Hi scottlaird
awesome that's all OP, you're great
I attach XML
thank you so much for your work

 

Hopefully the correct place:
I have Delta A3 drives, so excited to see this update, but struggling

I installed LinuxCNC using 2.9.2 live ISO
Followed instructions in forum.linuxcnc.org/ethercat/45336-etherc...-how-to-step-by-step
Able to get Delta A3 to show up in "ethercat slaves"

Trying to run a simple config for Delta A3 resulted in:
So I figured I must not be using the correct ethercat driver source (the one mentioned in this thread)?

So I followed instuctions from:
github.com/linuxcnc-ethercat/linuxcnc-et...t?tab=readme-ov-file

But this has caused issues:
Now Package manager won't run at all

I am pretty limited with this stuff. I'm essentially limited to copy and paste / follow directions.

Any help appreciated!