I'm working on connecting a custom motion controller board to a EtherCAT field bus. I would like to write some type of wrapper between the command set for the controller and for the EtherCAT network. This is where I get confused. I can't seem to find a standardized motor control interface for EtherCAT. Instead they seem to tunnel other protocols (device profiles) over EtherCAT like CAN Open and SERCOS.

Am I wrong, does EtherCAT have its own motion control protocol? If not, any suggestions what to choose: CAN Open, SERCOS or something else?

Best Regards,
Ola Bångdahl

 

Short answer: EtherCAT don't have a native motion control protocol.
CANopen is the way to go, IMHO.

Best Regards
Armin Steinhoff

 

Thank you quick and concise reply!

I'll have a look at the CAN Open documentation and see what I can find.

Best Regards,
Ola Bångdahl

 

A good starting point could also be:
http://www.etherlab.org/en/components.php

Best Regards,

Armin Steinhoff

 

Hi again,

Now I've managed to establish basic communications between my slave and twincat and I've seen that I can get my motor to run.

This prototype does not need to implement a drive profile at the moment since it's only going to be used as a demonstration example.

Now I send my data through the EtherCAT mailbox protocol with TwinCAT. Every time I need to set a parameter I right click on a variable and do a "Online Write". Is there any way to automate this in TwinCAT. I have at the moment no wish to write an external program and link it through ADS only to set a few parameters. For my purposes it feels like a lot of work for a simple task. My hope was to use an "additional task" or something similar to set up a list of outputs to send in sequence or something like that. Is that possible?

Best Regards,
Ola Bångdahl

 

you can use EtherCAT slave controller IP core for ALtera or Xillinx FPGA.
That's most useful for your motion control application.