hardware

Topics

Scope

Most field issues are not EtherCAT protocol faults but physical/system integration problems:

  • cabling
  • missing or partial power
  • drive/motor/encoder mismatch
  • wrong slave/axis mapping in configuration

First Checks (Before Any Restart)

  1. Open ecmcMain.ui and inspect overall status:
    • real-time thread
    • EtherCAT master
    • slave overview
    • motion axes and PLCs
  2. Confirm slave states from shell (ethercat slaves) and/or iocsh.
  3. Verify that expected slaves are in OP.
caqtdm -macro "IOC=<iocname>" ecmcMain.ui

red channels are not automatically wrong; they can also indicate intentionally unconnected signals.

Do not blindly restart the IOC with partially working EtherCAT hardware. This can leave the IOC in a non-recovering startup state.

Device-Specific Articles

Use the pages below for terminal/drive-specific diagnostics: