How good is Ethercat motion control?

Is there a real delay with rigid tapping when we're using ethercat?

I'm running my old okuma mill with a mesa setup and it's working just fine. Although max I've tapped is 600rpm.

Don't really know how fast the Spindle encoder is read by the mesa. But i guess it's definitely updating every servo thread cycle.

Can't we expect the same performance for rigid tapping with ethercat?

If your current Mesa setup already delivers stable rigid tapping, and you’re not confident you can guarantee the same margin of performance and robustness with EtherCAT, then from an engineering and risk standpoint there’s no strong reason to change.

EtherCAT can certainly work and can reach high performance, but it requires more integration effort, tuning, and understanding of the drives and control cycle to achieve the same level of determinism you already have with Mesa.

If the goal is simply to get “the same performance” you already have, the change becomes technical risk without a clear benefit. In that case, the most conservative and rational decision is to stay with Mesa.

Moving to EtherCAT only really makes sense if there is a clear advantage (architecture, cabling, drive availability, industrial standardization, etc.) and you’re willing to invest the time needed for commissioning and tuning to extract the same level of performance.

I was about to ask if i should delete the short double....

I'm trying ethercat for a new machine. It makes sense to go with ethercat because it originally had absolute servos for all axis and for the tool changer magazine. If I'm running a mesa setup i need to get the absolute encoder reading at the start via modbus.

I've been running Linuxcnc for a ling time for 3 of my machines. Also like to play with ethercat as it's more interesting.

I've seen a video of ethercat running at 8kz servo thread but also found out that some Ethernet ports do not support that due to power saving Ethernet stuff.

Running a faster servi thread might solve most of these issues i guess?

I see — if you want to explore EtherCAT and your machine already has absolute servos (including the tool changer magazine), that’s a perfectly valid reason to go that way.

Just be aware that you’re moving from a very KISS, well-understood Mesa setup into more of a “welcome to the jungle” zone: more knobs to turn, more things that can affect determinism (NIC, kernel, DC config, drive modes, etc.), and more commissioning work before you get the same level of predictability.

Coming from Mechatrolink, where a lot of this is implicit in the controller, with PC-based EtherCAT it looks like you first have to make these fundamentals explicit (DC, cycle stability, NIC behavior, jitter) before worrying about pushing the servo thread frequency.

A lot of people on the forum are still exploring this space too, so expect some iteration and experimentation along the way. And those who are really “in the trenches” with EtherCAT on LinuxCNC can probably give you much more concrete numbers and practical advice.

Marcos DC wrote:

with PC-based EtherCAT it looks like you first have to make these fundamentals explicit (DC, cycle stability, NIC behavior, jitter) before worrying about pushing the servo thread frequency.

 

Probably depends on the hardware you choose.
I have installed 3 ethercat Linuxcnc systems in the past 12 mo. and have not needed to touch any of the above mentioned tweaks. Everything just worked and is being used daily with no glitches yet. All of them running stock servo-thread of 1 mS.

Now just recently bought a 4 axis ethercat stepper drive, this is the first ethercat hardware I've used that was not fully supported out of the box.

Plus I have two half finished LinuxCNC projects that don't count because they're not yet in use. The ethercat part went together easy enough but other aspects of these two projects are needing more work.