UPDATES! (edited)
Rod - I have not tried the esi-data thing. Not sure how to use it or if it will yield any gains at this point.
I have loaded a trial version of TwinCAT and successfully linked to the XPR using the ESI file provided by Hypertherm. Even brought it up to OP mode. I then exported an ENI configuration file. I added the InitCmds under Mailbox in a file and included the file reference in my xml.
I found that the xml file is actually parsed by the linuxcnc-ethercat (lcec) hal component. And now I have located some documentation for it on github.
lcec seems to be ok with my 2 ENI files as they are.
They are attached (also attached my hal file):
ethercat-config-xpr-combined.xml
xpr-inits.xml
xpr_test.hal
However, the XPR is not happy. Here's a printout of dmesg | grep EtherCAT after starting a halrun session with the above hal file:
No idea what is going on here. What could be wrong with the input configuration? Any help would be much appreciated. I would like to share a working configuration for an XPR with everyone.
Thanks,
Butch