Separating CiA402 Logic from EtherCAT (lcec): Modular Adapter + Drive Stub Valid

Marcos DC wrote:

Sorry for the late reply — I was a bit busy the last days.


 

Same here. It'll be several more days till I get back to this project.image missing /media/kunena/emoticons/smile.png

Hi @NWE,

No worries — things have been a bit busy on my side too

Over the last days I focused on validating the CiA402 logic layer in simulation using a HAL drive stub. The main pieces are behaving as expected now (PDS state machine, controlword composition, homing supervision, etc.).

I also added a small gantry supervisor component on top of the CiA402 layer to experiment with safe decouple/recouple behaviour when drives perform internal motion like CiA402 homing.

At the moment everything is running inside HAL with two simulated drives.
Next step is reconnecting this to the EtherCAT side through an adapter layer.

I'm also planning to write a small Python CLI diagnostic tool to read the HAL signals and print a quick snapshot of the CiA402 state to help with testing.

Your Lichuan drive with 4 axes in one unit is quite interesting — that could be a very good test case once the EtherCAT adapter is wired.

I might also open a separate thread later describing the small framework this is turning into and include your two drives as example adapters.

No rush at all

Small progress update: the stub has basically turned into a virtual drive backend for validation.
I’m already exercising a fair amount of the core CiA402 runtime behavior in AXIS SIM with it.
Still a lot left to test before going back to real EtherCAT hardware, but the direction looks good.