Ethercat HAL driver

Hi all,
wishing to get some feedback on ethercat drives,

New machine being built was meant to use Yaskawa Sigma-7 SGDS Analog drivers but due to stock issues the supplier suggested to use the EtherCat versions of these, rushing around trying to understand these drivers and ethercat systems so the build can continue

Is the development far enough to be able to use LinuxCNC as an ethercat master to directly drive a machine based off these drives? or would there need to be some board in between?
Would it be possible to have a system running to a stage of basic cutting without months of coding/tuning?

It would be great to use these as they have absolute encoders for homing, the next option is downgrading a series to keep analog driven motors+incremental encoders .

Machine is for hobby use for 3D molds where each mold is a one-off

Cheers

hi Bradn5,
I have no experience in the servo Yaskawa Sigma-7 SGDS, but you should not have many problems, you can use the generic method or build your own driver.

regards
Chimeno

Hello all,

I have a problem getting the EtherCATdriver to work.

When I try to start Linuxcnc i get this error:

lcec: dlopen: /usr/lib/linuxcnc/modules/lcec.so: undefined symbol: rtapi_mutex_get
./EtherCAT_Test.hal:17: waitpid failed /usr/bin/rtapi_app lcec
./EtherCAT_Test.hal:17: /usr/bin/rtapi_app exited without becoming ready
./EtherCAT_Test.hal:17: insmod for lcec failed, returned -1


Can someone tell me what the Problem is, or this error means?

I´m using the linuxcnc-stretch-uspace-amd64-r10.iso, compiled the Debian package of github.com/sittner/ec-debianize and installed it, compiled github.com/sittner/linuxcnc-ethercat and installed it with make install.
Then I set up a simple test config with this lines in the .hal
loadusr -W lcec_conf ethercat-conf.xml
loadrt lcec
In the ethercat-conf.xml i´ve is only a EK110 Bus Coupler configured.

I´m quite new to Linuxcnc and maybe ist just a stupid mistake.
Would be very great if someone could help me.

Kind Regards,
René

I was wondering if rtapi_mutex_get() was only defined in RTAI, but it appears to appear in uspace too:

github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/master.../rtapi/rtapi_mutex.h

Were there any warnings during compilation?

Hi andypugh,
thanks for your reply.
I don´t remember any warnings.
I will try to compile again and look for warnings.

Do you know more about rtapi_mutex_get, what is this or what does it do?

It is something to do with giving different modules mutally-exclusive access to code, so that one routine does not change data while another is working on it.

More than that I don't know.