Anyone seen this?

I am keen for more affordable ethercat devices and would be happy to help out. I have no formal coding or electronics experience and just kludge things together. Bank rolling prototypes / production runs is something I could help with.

I have been tossing around ideas for an ecosystem.

Unmet needs:
Low cost IO
- example: ethercat IO module on gantry for limit switches, home switches, touch probe. Just need Ethernet cable and power from control box to the gantry
- multiple ethercat esc can do 16 GPIO without any MCU / FPGA

Lots of IO at reasonable cost - even cheap Chinese undocumented IO are $100+ for 16 IO, compare to Mesa where you get 48 IO
We should be able to have lots of IO for reasonable cost

Low cost HMI

Step generator. To link existing step/dir servos/steppers into ethercat

Sorry I misunderstood what you wrote.

Maybe there is enough interest in the community to make a couple different designs and open source them?

LAN9252 would be the ”easy” option as you could pair it with any mcu but something like the AX58100 would be pretty cool. You could do tons of stuff with the chip alone (ofcourse you need supporting components).

About the FPGA ethercat IP core, is the license tied to the chip like it is for example LAN9252, so that you have ”limited” number of FPGAs that you can work on? Or you need to buy a software license to integrate it to an FPGA?

AX58100 looks good, but reliable suppliers an issue.

AX58400 looks amazing, but haven't found a source. I have not contacted ASIX to enquire.

I can't see creating an ESC in FPGA being worthwhile. LAN9252 is about $10.
www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/10ydm1i/ethercat_slave_in_fpga/

Cheap MCU like RP2040 ($1) are plenty for most use cases. And easily programmed / reconfigured.
ESP32-P4 also looks like it would be a good option for MCU.

Mikroe EtherCat Click already offers LAN9252 -> SPI
So one simple first module might be SPI -> MCU -> GPIO
(This module could then also be used directly with RPI / SBC with SPI)

RDA wrote:

Sorry I misunderstood what you wrote.

Maybe there is enough interest in the community to make a couple different designs and open source them?

LAN9252 would be the ”easy” option as you could pair it with any mcu but something like the AX58100 would be pretty cool. You could do tons of stuff with the chip alone (ofcourse you need supporting components).

About the FPGA ethercat IP core, is the license tied to the chip like it is for example LAN9252, so that you have ”limited” number of FPGAs that you can work on? Or you need to buy a software license to integrate it to an FPGA?
 

The link I posted in the first post was open source from the "MetalMustangs" Youtube channel. He posts here, cant remember his screen name....something with starts with an H

I looked for info on that AX.... chip as MetalMustangs switched to using it for a 2nd PCB....he didn't explain why. I couldn't find good info and I never heard of ASIX so It's not something I want to touch. I'm more worried about the code personally, the code for the above doesn't look very friendly. If I can get my friend involved he'll get that straightened out....if he takes it seriously.

As for the FPGA core I have no idea, I'd imagine the cost is less than implimenting a physical chip. But yeah I think it's generally charged by the number of devices produced since it's IP.

pippin88 wrote:

AX58100 looks good, but reliable suppliers an issue.

AX58400 looks amazing, but haven't found a source. I have not contacted ASIX to enquire.

I can't see creating an ESC in FPGA being worthwhile. LAN9252 is about $10.
www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/10ydm1i/ethercat_slave_in_fpga/

Cheap MCU like RP2040 ($1) are plenty for most use cases. And easily programmed / reconfigured.
ESP32-P4 also looks like it would be a good option for MCU.

Mikroe EtherCat Click already offers LAN9252 -> SPI
So one simple first module might be SPI -> MCU -> GPIO
(This module could then also be used directly with RPI / SBC with SPI)
 

The ESC IP core already exists, you just buy the license. The whole point was that we already have tons of FPGA cards on the market, the Ethernet core can be replaced with the EtherCAT core. I'm sure it costs less than the actual chips in the long run.....doesn't mean it's cheap and it's something Mesa themselves would have to offer.

Those Dev boards aren't useful for anything I'm doing. I took the "easy route" and made carrier PCBs for dev boards for my current project and got burned by bad software projects. I'm just going to create a proper board this time and stick an STM32 next to a LAN9252 and let somebody go to town on the software. I don't see any good reason to use an RP2040 or anything else over an STM32 for what I'm doing, I have alot more options with STM32.

looks like metalmusing is hakan

hackaday.io/project/181058-ethercat-servodrive

notes on lan9252 and ax58100 with stm32

but yeah all the dev boards are too much money for what im doing, it would defeat the purpose of my project. if we can make something like that ethercat motion controller work with 3 axis, then it would be worth it for me, and i would make a shitty 3 axis stepstick board using one of those stm dev boards