Ethercat - newbie guidelines

Good morning to everyone,

As I am a completely newbie in this topic, I would like to start to play a bit with EtherCat. 
I have a spare delta driver with ethercat communication for  a 400w servo motor and I would like to see it moving with linuxcnc through ethercat . 
The future plan will be to refit a cnc with 6 axis.
Is there an updated guide somewhere from where to start to understand which hardware and software I need? 
I saw the 130pag discussion in the forum but it's a bit dispersive due to all the updates over years. 

Thanks in advance
Kind regards

Hi AlessandroT

did you ever get anywhere with your quest?

Pb

Unfortunately still nope:(

ok... what stage are you at... have you got a pc and the drive and just want to get a platform for a bit of dev working...??

if so (which is the nut i've recently been trying to crack) the way i've got going is using the iso image below...

github.com/grotius-cnc/LINUX_RTOS/releases/tag/1.0.0

it worked pretty much as described. and i've got to the stage where i can see the slaves on the ethercat bus in under the hour... and that's got me quite excited..

hope this helps...

Hi Alessandro,

I'll try to list the components that were needed in my working setup (maybe some of the software-points are already pre-installed in the image that Padstar mentioned...)

Hardware:

• compatible Network Interface Card
• EC Slave like EK1100 or a EC Motor Amplifier

Software:

• Etherlab ( www.etherlab.org/download/ethercat/ )  - I use version 1.5.2
• LinuxCNC EC Driver ( wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EtherCatDriver )
• LinuxCNC of course
  

The main Points that need to be configured in etherlab are

• Mac-Adress of your interface card
• the Device driver -> e1000e
• the config file to be used

Suggestion of Debug-Steps (that actually worked for me):

After Installing an configurating Etherlab you should be able to start EtherCAT The current status of the EC can be shown via
If everything is configured correctly, you should be able to see an attached slave.
If this works, you can go on for parametrization of the EC-Driver for LinuxCNC

Just let us know, which step you are trying to take

 

I'll throw in my video of when I tested Ethercat on an raspberry but it is the same for Intel.
If your Delta driver is a cia402 device this should give you a starting point.

Hello Hakan,

nice video

regarding the cia402 (I unfortunately don't have one): in order to get the Amps in OP-Mode and switch the drives on, do you have to handle the statemachine manually in the hal-files, or is this all handled by the driver you installed?

edit: of course are my amps also cia402 conform. I oriented for the implementation on the beckhoff-description and skipped this part in the documentation

3radfahrer wrote:

Hello Hakan,

nice video

regarding the cia402 (I unfortunately don't have one): in order to get the Amps in OP-Mode and switch the drives on, do you have to handle the statemachine manually in the hal-files, or is this all handled by the driver you installed?

Yes, turning on and changing to home states is all handled for you with cia402 drives by the component.
There are some requirements in your hal file regarding component load order.
 

Hi,

For info. The ethercat iso downloads following the link of Padstar:

637 github.
174 sourceforge.

Thanks for this info.
Then it seems to be quite similar to the implementation of my amps in combination with the generic driver