Ethercat on Retrofit mill 3 + 2 axis

Hello Forum members,

My future goal is to retrofit my old 3-axis CNC mill, at this moment equipped with Fanuc 0M, and add 2 rotary axis (A-C) to can work 5-axis simultaneously with TCP. I have a good knowledge from electronics, bus systems and work several years as CNC/Fanuc Robot programmer/operator.  I am very new to Linux(CNC) and have still much to learn.

In this Topic I want to describe the conversion as well as the construction of my self-designed 4-5 rotary axis. I hope forum members can support me here and there.

At this moment I am at the point that I have Linux CNC + Ethercat working on a laptop. I am working with Leadshine L8 Ethercat servo drives. The both connected servo motors i can turn with Jog command in LinuxCNC. So far so good. Because I have only purchased 2 drives (for A and C rotary) and connected at this moment, I see the slaves with the ethercat slaves command.

What I don't understand is that in Leadshine's motion studio (Drive configurator) I have set the drives to ethercat slave ID 3 and 4, as I want to reserve ID 0, 1 and 2 for X, Y and Z.
How can I force Ethercat master/slave to use the in the drive setup slave ID's?

 

The slave numbering is based on the order the slaves are connected on the BUS. its not arbitrary.
There is a way to apply a name in the XML file but I can't remember how. You  could name the drives J0, J3,J2, J1 etc in your arbitrary orderand that will flow into linuxcnc.
Note all the pieces are now available from repositories as of yesterday. I reworked the Sticky I have written in this section yesterday.
Together with the Linuxcnc live Image I have created, there is now  nice package to install Linuxcnc, ethercat and the hal driver very easilly if for some reason you need to reinstall.

Thanks Rod, any help is welcome. Is there a document or manual somewhere where I can find how to do this? Anyway, I want to try and learn something from it.

Thank you very much for your Sticky, from there I installed it a few weeks ago and got it to work. Keep up the good work. I certainly wouldn't have succeeded otherwise.

I'm only a newcomer to ethercat so am not aware of any documentation
I just had a look at the hal driver code, Try something like:

If it does not error, look around in halshow

hello,

I am generally recommend to you install beckhoff twincat3 software. It is free and there are tons everywhere of axis solution examples. If you are new, you can freelly create axis NC setup and check what is required for running them in CSP or what ever move... + great old tool beckhoff infosys where is everything and little bit more ... 

All necessary stuff for generic.xml configutation like vendor ID, product ID, config DC etc you will find in .esi (.xml file from vendor). When you will have some stuff hooked on working ethercat you can grab all above from slave over command from ethercat itself .. 

topology of ethercat is stricted given.... like it is hardware connected - it is master and slaves : slave 0(joint.XXX) - slave 1(joint.XXY) - slave 2(ek1100) - slave 3(EL1008 - connected to EK1100) - slave 4(joint.XXZ) etc etc.... 

when you want to you just A + C axis you will have minimum topology - Master(your PC) - drive A(slave 0) - drive C(slave 1) in the you ethercat.xml file ... XYZ you will have just simulated 

regards Slav

@psylocke

I am also working with EL8 drives would you mind sharing your hal, xml, ini files.

Eric