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When I run the "sudo dpkg-reconfigure" command it says it needs a package name. Do you recall what package needs to be reconfigured?

Sure:
 
See attached. 

hallo,

den tool dm habe ich eingetragen. das ändert nichts.
In der hal anzeige lassen sich xyz und probe input tasten, alles andere nicht.
Der probe taster lößt noch aus. Siehe hal anzeige..
 ich glaube ich gebe auf...?

karlhe

Thank you for your suggestions as well, Tommy. Sadly, there is a planned power outage tomorrow so I will be able to put them to practice on Monday at the earliest... I'll post an update immediately afterwards.

Hm, you are correct, it is weird how they are all zeroes, except the 6th slave which is a 1. But this is indeed the output:

(I have attached the full output as a separate file so as not to have a wall of text)

What does this suggest in your opinion? I do have the xml from the manufacturer on me (attached as well) and it does look like these are the intended PIDs even there. Could this weird decision from the manufacturer be causing some conflict with LinuxCNC?

Also regarding your latter question, I do believe that is the case, but I am not sure if there is any better way to confirm this than simply removing all wired connections from the XFCE internet settings. I even disabled the other ethernet port of the PC. This also stopped the constant notifications that the network was disconnected. Do you have anything else in mind I can try to be 100% certain?

I finally managed to get all the parts & wiring done. Settled with a 7I97T and a 7I84 controlled by a Raspberry Pi.
Crazy to think that the little Pi is probably 10x more powerful than the huge Siemens controller.
 

I implemented the tool changer via classicladder and it really works like a charm, pretty happy with it.

Now I just have to tune the PIDs for the servos and I can run some test parts. The Fusion360 CAM section for turning looks way simpler than for milling, pretty much just 4 operations, so I think I'll pick this up quickly.

I fixed the link and cleaned up the thread.

JT

snowgoer540 yes it definitely raises an eyebrow.
To the original poster. if this isn't a gateway for spam, then I have two words for all your stated questions.
It Depends.
in MY opinion accuracy is far better then speed, that requirement only goes up when dealing with highly
dense circuit boards with very small components. Like say 0201 SMD sizes.
Do you want to place high pin count chips on the same run? Accuracy again is key. Having to realign
chips after going through the reflow is a major pain.
The key questions you would need to answer are -
Whats the smallest component you will be dealing with?
What's the maximum size PCB you are willing to deal with?
How much do you require the machine to do automatically?
Do you require the machine to place glue dots on the board?
Will you accept using a machine that requires an external air source?
Does the machine need to operate 24/7 365?
Do you require an entire assembly line with the PnP?
( solder screener, PnP, reflow oven, post reflow inspection, PCB cleaning)

This is all highly dependent on Your requirements. The more you want to happen automatically the more expensive
things get.

lastly, don't take it personally about the SPAM comment we get a ton of it on this site all the time.
 

I it correct that the PIDs for all drives is 0?
What does ethercat slaves -v say?
Can you confirm that there is now a dedicated ethernet connection for ethercat?

Not EtherCAT but it is general networking:
-check cables one by one
-test only a single drive at a time
-for wireshark you would need an old hub, not a switch, to be able to see all the trafic, or use the laptop as a proxy between the control pc and ethercat equipment
-wireshark needs a network card that can do "promiscuous" mode to monitor everything, some cards can not do that despite working with wireshark and showing some trafic.

Rod, not it, it never is.
See point 2 on his reply, he can hear the solenoid inside the plasma switch on, so the relay is closing and switching stuff on.

Ich kenne Easy Probe nicht aber ich kann mir vorstellen, dass du für Tool 99 einen Durchmesser eingeben musst:

 

Hello everyone,

this will most probably turn out to be a rather long write and it is my first time posting here so please bear with me. I would say I am a beginner with LinuxCNC, despite being quite the general GNU/Linux nerd but I have done a lot of reading on the forum and the docs in the past month.

I have "inherited" so to say the machine from the person who wrote this post . The backstory is in there if you need any more context.

In short, I am still sort of stuck at the same problem the colleague before me couldn't resolve, namely the machine (servos, spindle and IO) being inconsistent with its EtherCAT connection (I assume). The first sign was that initially it was basically a coin flip as to whether the .ini program would even start. Most times it exited with an error about the Master PDOs not being correct and dmesg would report some random pin (that was defined in the xml) not being present. Different LAN cables were tried, but that didn't help so I was initially worried the IO was busted, but I pushed on and managed to drastically improve this problem in particular. I discovered that the OS was trying to establish an Ethernet connection over the LAN cable which to my understanding can definitely disturb EtherCAT communications. I made sure to disable that which allowed me to basically launch the .ini with certainty. It is still not perfect, since sometimes after a reboot I need to restart the EtherCAT driver with ethercatctl restart and/or replug the cable but after that there are no issues with this until the next reboot at least.

Just as I thought I was out of the woods, I would notice that on some executions of a test program I would run (not all, still a coin toss), the machine would emit uncomfortable noises as the axis moved. Not only that, but usually when I would leave it running for a few hours, I would find LinuxCNC reporting some random each time IO error and the program having stopped (interestingly it is the same behavior that I observe upon directly yanking the LAN cable out as it is in operation). I see in the previous post my colleague had the same issue which you guys suggested was due to a packet loss of some sort. And so it would seem, as ethercat masters -v does sometimes report lost frames. Sometimes in the tens, sometimes in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands.

The one suspicious thing I think I have spotted is the latency test. It would run between 30k-65k ns but as ethercat masters -v start counting up on lost frames, the latency increases two or even threefold. The lost frames would then stop increasing and normal behavior is resumed. Since I couldn't find a great reference, do you believe these latency numbers are to be expected?

I am quite stumped on what to do. I tried monitoring for lost packets through WireShark on the Master PC, but there was no odd behavior there. The irq_coalescence suggestion by rodw didn't seem to help and setting refClockSyncSycles to -1 as suggested by db1981 didn't allow me to launch the .ini in the first place. Although I do admit I didn't quite understand what setting it to -1 is supposed to achieve. I see that in order to do this you would need to apply some sort of patch, but since that was for lcnc 2.8 I am not sure if I should try this on the current version 2.9.3. How would I go about installing it when my EC installation is through the repositories instead of from source?

Do you guys have any ideas on what I could attempt? I think my plan for the short term will be to try to use a laptop as a WireShark middleman to better monitor for packet loss according to the PDF I will leave in the attachments (I have no source for it sadly). If that doesn't yield anything, I will probably try to replace the IO module with some sort of other IO Ethercat board and redo the mappings to see if it is indeed the IO after all, while triple checking for faulty wiring as I go.

I am also attaching my .xml, .hal and .ini files just in case.

Any help or suggestions are very appreciated. Do let me know if I can specify something I've missed in this post. Thank you!

PS. I realize I should probably mention that the onboard PC is running off a SATA SSD to which I cloned my LinuxCNC virtual machine test bench to. From what I have seen there do not seem to be any driver discrepancies or errors, but I thought I would point it out as it is yet another quirk in my setup.

This is my guess
linuxcnc.org/docs/stable/html/plasma/qtp...asma:qt-contact-load
It will take time for the oxidisation to burn off maybe 10 cycles or more.

its not finding your xml file, try

loadusr -W lcec_conf ./ethercat-conf.xml