hardware

Topics

culprit

From experience, very few issues are related to the EtherCAT hardware itself. Mostly the cabling or the actual motor/encoder hardware is to blame.

Even more likely is human error, such as:

  • wrong scaling of the axis
  • writing to the wrong hardware (forgot to select the right slave in the axis config)
  • …

check the status

Before anything is restarted or power cycled, check the status of the system.

A simple way to get an overview of the entire ecmc system is to start the ecmcMain.ui panel. This panel contains, or links to, almost the entire ecmc IOC:

  • thread status
  • EtherCAT master status
  • EtherCAT slaves status (overview of all configured slaves)
  • motion axes (all axes in the system are reachable)
  • PLC:s
  • …
caqtdm -macro "IOC=<iocname>" ecmcMain.ui

Remember, red is not necessarily a bad sign! It can also indicate that certain channels are not connected. Whether those channels should be connected is beyond the scope of this guide.

Next step is to diagnose from a dedicated shell, or from within the iocsh.

If all slaves are in ‘OP’ state, at least data is exchanged between the hardware and the master.

restarting the IOC

Blindly restarting the IOC, with only partially working EtherCAT hardware, WILL RESULT IN TOTAL FAILURE OF THE IOC!!!

Check the hardware BEFORE restarting the IOC!