Ethercat Setup help needed for beginner

That sounds promising... @andrax
To the folllwing error: fault on my side. The servo was set too soft, and when decelerating there was too much play. Set it a bit harder and now it works. 
Mesa card arrives tomorow. Gonna try my best.

When you have come this far with EtherCAT you can just keep on going.
No point in switching to Mesa now. Unless you want a Mesa system of course.

Mesa for my i/o, as i dont have any ethercat 24v i/o. As there might be glass scales in the future, not sure yet. But for general i/o as a jogwheel, pneumatics, Buttons etc. And for spindle vfd. Run, dir, pwm... Mesa cheaper than endless Beckhoff units.

Spezidrohne wrote:

Mesa for my i/o, as i dont have any ethercat 24v i/o. As there might be glass scales in the future, not sure yet. But for general i/o as a jogwheel, pneumatics, Buttons etc. And for spindle vfd. Run, dir, pwm... Mesa cheaper than endless Beckhoff units.

Many people look for used  beckhoff modules on eBay.

I just got this working for testing yesterday
www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005340849270.html
It is documented (including manuals)  on the forum here.
It seems to include all I/O you need. It even has 0-10 volt input for plasma torch voltage and 0-10 volt output for spindle. It would be interesting to get the RS485 modbus working to control the spindle VFD but that might be asking too much....

No problem to have both EtherCAT and Mesa. Two network adapters.
You possibly have some IO on the servo drives if you look.
See if you can run the vfd on Modbus, saves alot of IO and get a lot of functionality.

It is an older 15kw Tosvert that i repaired some time ago, dont think its in the modbus era. So traditional i/o it is. The servo drives only have 2-3inputs for internal use, like fault reset, homing switch and e-stop.

Normally it should be much cheaper to use Beckhoff Interfaces as long as you buy them cheap from ebay or kleinanzeigen (here in germany). This is one of the main benefits of an ethercat setup.

A servo of this size is not a toy.
The “Servo On” or “Enable” signal comes from the controller (PLC / lcnc).
The emergency stop and limit switches are hardwired.

rodw wrote:

Many people look for used  beckhoff modules on eBay.

I used to do that a lot. Sometimes certain Beckhoff models I wanted were not available from ebay or seemingly anywhere else. A while back I contacted Beckhoff, asking them what distributor they suggest I buy from. They said they sell direct. 

Now I mostly buy direct from Beckhoff. I discovered some new parts I had bought from ebay were more expensive on ebay than they were direct from Beckhoff.

Yes, it certainly pays to get a quote from Beckhoff first. Some of their modules are really cheap and others like encoders 5151 etc al are expensive here in Australia.