Custom EtherCAT device
- PCW
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It would be no better than a parallel port performance wise.
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- Tady
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- rft
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still, for the price, parallel port performance would be nice for general purpose stuff, compared to the price of Ethercat hardware.
The chip needs a config file written in EEPROM, to put it in the Digital I/O mode.
I try and get some boards together for testing.
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- Tady
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- RDA
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Dont say ”non” when there are chips that have ethercat and mcu in the same chip. I mean its only a handful of those but they do exist, example TI has the AM335X and Asix makes the AX58X00.Non of the MCU has EtherCAT support via hardware you always need to use an ASIC. Tipically it connects via SPI or QSPI. With an Application Specific Integrated Circuit you can use the MCU for exchanging the data with the master and soing other stuff whil minimizing latency and jitter on the bus itself. Because the ASIC is responsible to recieve the packets on one port and while extracting data it also forwards the packet to the output port for the next slave.
I succesfully made the slave and interfaced it with an analog servo.
I setup the machine so one turn of the motor represents 4mm of movement eith this I achived 14m/min speed vith 0.1mm error while moving. This was dons only with FF1 and P tunning. If I spet more time on this I could lower the error. The movement is smooth without any problems
The TI is overkill for small projects but the Asix chips look nice on paper. But nobody knows where to get them.
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- RDA
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ok, I see, so for proper real time performance there would be distributed clocks running on the MCU or FPGA, synchronized over etherCAT.
still, for the price, parallel port performance would be nice for general purpose stuff, compared to the price of Ethercat hardware.
The chip needs a config file written in EEPROM, to put it in the Digital I/O mode.
I try and get some boards together for testing.
As far as I remember you need to also set it to IO mode using the bootstrap resistors.
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- Tady
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- RDA
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Hats off to the person that finds a place where you can buy these. They look pretty ideal for this kind of stuff, check example the AX58100 www.asix.com.tw/en/product/IndustrialEthernet/EtherCAT/AX58100
Edit: Seems you can get these from aliexpress, or something claimed to be the chip at least. Under 15$ for a mcu with ethercat doesnt seem too bad.
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