New LinuxCNC-Ethercat git tree

power activated, sees all OP slaves
maybe so...


 

Well I'm a total EtherCAT newbie, but isn't this just the lcec code trying to download settings to your Delta drive? If your CNC is powered off is the Delta drive is powered off too and so if (of course) can't accept LinuxCNC commands over EtherCAT.

I have parts including Delta B3 shipping "soon" and already have four Beckhoff I/O modules working just fine so anything you discover about LinuxCNC 2.9.2 and Delta drives is great.

As is often the case in Linux, if you happen to dig into a project just when it is maturing, life can be wonderful! I think LinuxCNC + EtherCAT "works" for years but is now "works+EASY"

Entertainingly, prior to 1.13.1, it would queue SDOs for the drive asynchronously, so if they failed then nothing actually noticed. This meant that when bad settings were sent *no one could tell* until the drive failed to work. There'd be a record in 'dmesg', but very few people notice unless there are problems.

But, the flip side of this is that the way SDO settings were queued up they'd be re-set when the device powered on. So, weirdly, talking to a powered-off drive should actually have worked. That wasn't a case that I'd really considered.

We now have better error reporting, *and* we still keep SDO settings around so we can re-set them if the slave reboots. The downside is that we require that devices are powered on up front.

Is supporting powered-down devices something that we should be paying attention to?

I'd think that a one-shot information message right after:

"Failed to execute SDO download"

something like:

"Are any of your EtherCAT devices powered off? Did you add/remove a device w/out editing your XML?

I suspect LinuxCNC isn't happy if an ethernet attached Mesa 7i76e is powered off either.

A simple hint could reassure the user that nothing may be broken, just forgot to power something up.

I had written something on this yesterday, but apparently failed to post ist.

If the devices are off, the EC master cannot connect and accordingly linuxcnc can't start. That to me is entirely logical behaviour and fine. If a mesa card is offline, linuxcnc will crash as well.

Scottlaird:
Is supporting powered-down devices something that we should be paying attention to?

hi, I don't know
during the changes of recent weeks there was a moment in which LCNC started when the devices were turned off,
now no longer.
I thought there was a problem, but everything is ok
Thank you