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I debugged the translator .. its online again!

Thanks. I have two machines that run Linuxcnc l. one with 3 parallel ports and running a production job. Other is an old but workhorse of a mill that run the mesa setup. Both are used daily. I'd say I'm good with Linuxcnc but first time using ethercat.

Servos that i choose are beefy. 3kw on x and y and 4.5 on z. Machine is worth saving as it's in near perfect condition. No backlash or spindle runout.

Do you know how the ethercat control loop actually works?

your user profile has been deleted.

Congratulations Andy. Well deserved. Your efforts and support have been invaluable to this community for years.
Cheers,
Mark

If full deletion isn’t possible, could you please anonymise my account.

Sometimes, I have set up a basic working machine ignoring the motion parameters. Once I have any motion working, I cut and past the tried and proven motion from the old config to the new one.
But if they are the same, just copy the folder.

In my experience, Erhercat is no different in performance to Mesa cards. In fact, I found I had to reduce acceleration and max velocity because my motors drove so hard but could not overtake inertia on stopping with Ethercat motors because of the mass of the table and following errors were happening. I just put that down to the normal tuning process as I was asking for speeds too high for machine physics and the motors delivered what I asked for. I would say Ethercat is not for the novice although some novices conquer it. This is because there is the additional complexity added by the Ethercat layer.
The plus side is the Ethercat wiring is a lot simpler.
I would recommend cia402 compatible drives.
With a machine under your belt its is worth considering.

I'm looking forward to retrofit an new to me Okuma MC30-VA mill. I already have another okuma will with a Mesa setup that's been a workhorse and never skipped a beat for the last 3 years. It uses Delta ASDA A2 servos (Incremental with home switches) and it's been incredibly accurate and repeatable with properly tuned servos. Even 3D surfacing at high speed, it handles like a champ.

So I need to use absolute servos for this new machine. Looking at delta ASDA A3 servos as the drives have Ethercat support. 
My main concern is not the price of Beckhoff modules. I'm curious to know how the ethercat setup handles the motion control part. In mesa we get the FPGA base step/dir signals and I read the ethercat system uses a target position. So I guess the control loop is closed on the PC with the encoder feedback from the motors. So how fast can you really push an ethercat system without running into following errors and latency errors etc.? I mean like in high speed 3d surfacing ? 

Can anyone offer some advice on which system should I go with or point me to some user experiences?

This machine is in excellent shape I really like to set this up as close to a oem controller.

 

Latency test is only used for testing the pc, don't use the jitter value for BASE_PERIOD, try 50000.

Should i also delete my quotes of your posts?
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BTW, i am afraid to ask why, but i am also sure you have your reasons.

Hi, did anyone get this to work?
I'm planning to use delta absolute servos for a retrofit, I'm very familiar with mesa hardware and really like to use absolute servo position for homing. 

Hi Endian, I am just getting started with setting up an ax5203 drive and your scripts and configs mentioned in this and previous topics sound really helpful, but they are no longer available on your codeberg. Do you plan on reuploading them somewhere?

I didn't have the SUBROUTINE PATH located in the [RS274NGC] section of the .INI file. That allowed me to use my subroutines with slight modifications..

I would try using a new LAN cable, preferably CAT6

Changing the cable can help a little. You can also try to go even lower with the SPI frequency; it really depends on how fast your servo thread is and as long as your SPI communication is faster than the servo thread, it shouldn't be a problem.

I agree that the wiring would be a mess if you had to wire the TMC directly to the RPi. I was surprised when you said that the H7 version worked but not the F4, as they share the same remora-core repo, which contains the tmc module. I think I found out why: on the SKR (H7), the remora comms is on one SPI channel, and the drivers are on another one. Scotta decided to use SoftwareSPI to communicate with the drivers. On the Octopus pro (F4), the remora comms and the motor drivers share the SPI 1 channel, so my guess is that is causing the issue. To my understanding, the same SPI channel cannot be a master and a slave at the same time, and it is a slave for the Remora component. If you want it to work on the Octopus, you'd have to connect the RPi on a different SPI channel and adapt your platform.ini file accordingly. I don't have a board myself, but as far as I could see on the product datasheet you could use the SPI 3 channel on the J74 header.