Ethercat random jitter fix

I'll wait and see what Sascha has to say, and wait a bit more to see if Scott will be able to dedicate sometime to the project.

Should I reach out to Bjarne? Or can you let him check the conversation in my PR in Scott's repo?

rodw wrote:

 

Its just a shame the Ethercat license does not allow linuxcnc to manage it.
 

Can you expand on this? People are allowed to develop one and post it, but it cant be "inside" linuxcnc?
 

I think is mostly architectural and organizational reasons, not strictly a license conflict. Both LinuxCNC and the IgH EtherCAT Master are **GPLv2**, so there's no real incompatibility there AFAIK. The separation exists because the EtherCAT master is an independent kernel subsystem, linuxcnc-ethercat is essentially a glue layer between two separate projects. Keeping it out-of-tree also lets it move faster without going through LinuxCNC's core review process. There is one additional wrinkle: the "EtherCAT brand and technology" is owned by Beckhoff, which adds an IP layer on top of the open-source licensing.

To use Ethercat, you need to become a member of The Ethercat Technology Group (ETG). Membership is free.  www.ethercat.org/default.htm
But membership is only open to companies or businesses and you need a tax number or equivalent in your country.

Linuxcnc is nothing, just a loose community of users. We don't even have a bank account.

This has been explored by a number of the development team members over the years. Most recently by Steffen Moller who lives in Germany where the ETG and Beckhoff are domiciled. (I may have prodded him in this direction)
I had the opportunity to raise Linuxcnc with Martin Rosten, Chaiman of the ETG when he visited Australia a few years ago. There is no way forward.

But now etherlab have a repository and also host the linuxcnc-ethercat driver and I put that repository into the Linuxcnc installer, there isn't really any need for linuxcnc to get involved. (Except to manage the code base).

I would recommend you and Grandixximo as manufacturers join the ETG.

My company is already part of ETG
We make ethercat hardware and are licensed for it

rodw wrote:

To use Ethercat, you need to become a member of The Ethercat Technology Group (ETG). Membership is free.  www.ethercat.org/default.htm
But membership is only open to companies or businesses and you need a tax number or equivalent in your country.

Linuxcnc is nothing, just a loose community of users. We don't even have a bank account.

This has been explored by a number of the development team members over the years. Most recently by Steffen Moller who lives in Germany where the ETG and Beckhoff are domiciled. (I may have prodded him in this direction)
I had the opportunity to raise Linuxcnc with Martin Rosten, Chaiman of the ETG when he visited Australia a few years ago. There is no way forward.

But now etherlab have a repository and also host the linuxcnc-ethercat driver and I put that repository into the Linuxcnc installer, there isn't really any need for linuxcnc to get involved. (Except to manage the code base).

I would recommend you and Grandixximo as manufacturers join the ETG.

Ok, so my inevitable follow up, what is tormach doing? Is it different cause they supply it in an installed state - installer method is irrelevant? OR are they as a company a member of ETG?

I don't currently supply any actual electrical directly. I just point people to linuxcnc for now. We are likely going to try and maintain some sort of guide with our config files to set things up, which will include this new patch. To make things easy and consistent for people.

Oh, and thanks everyone involved for this fix. It really seems to have solve quite a lot of little gremlins in one go.