crio 9074 ethercat with a switch/hub between the cRIO and the slaves

[David-n-MO]

Hi,  I have a cRIO9074 I am going to use to control 7 JVL EtherCat Mac800 motors.  The motors are rather widely spaced, so I am using a Beckhoff 5 port CU2005 EtherCat switch between the cRIO and the drives with 2 motors in series on three legs and one motor on a port by itself.  My problem is that labview will not find any of the motors unless only one of the motor ports on the switch is plugged in, or a motor line is plugged directly into cRIO ethercat port.  it has no problems seeing two motors on the same line, it just will not see any of them if more than one motor line is plugged into the ethercat switch.

So, HALP!

[Doug-B]

Hey David,

You really can't use the switch to communicate with all the motors on different lines. In EtherCat communication, all the devices need to be daisy-chained together and that 'chain' can't be broken or split. It seems like what is happening is that with more than one 'line' being fed into that switch, the line of communication is getting disrupted.

Regards,

Doug B

[David-n-MO]

Thanks for the reply.  I researched this a bit more after posting and learned that on Mount Beckhoff, the legendary home of the EtherCAT gods, they say that practically any Ethernet topology (I like that word, topology... top ology...) will work, but what I didn't know is that most of their products allow the different configurations without having to resort to hubs. The CU2005 hub I bought isn't EtherCAT compatible, but a new 8 port EtherCAT hub, CU1128 is, but won't be available until the end of the year.  Bummer. 

There is a solution however, and that is to purchase a Beckhoff EK1100 coupler and three mating EK1122 dual port Ethernet junction.  Now I don't know if this is going to work, but in a couple of days Beckhoff just happens to be coming by to visit the guy next to me and is bringing me the modules to test.  I will let you in on the results.

David

[Paul_Tyler]

Hi David, did you get his to work?

I have a similar system, using a PXI real-time target as my EtherCAT master, and Micro-Epsilon confocalDT 2451s as my EtherCAT slaves. A normal network switch didn't work so I got the Beckhoff units. When I try to add existing EtherCAT slaves it isn't detecting the EK1100 (or the EK1122s). If I connect one IFC-2451 direct to the PXI master then it will detect it. I have tried the same setup using Beckhoff's TwinCAT (30-day evaluation) and that works as expected.

Paul

[David-n-MO]

the Beckhoff gentlemen appeared with the ek1122 and I connected it to my EK1110 coupler.  The 9074 found all of the motors and also the coupler even though the coupler was lacking the configuration .xml file.  It looks like this solution will work just fine as soon as I receive the EK1122s i've ordered.  I need 4 ports to make it work for me.

as for your PXI chassis, are you running the ethercat from the second ethernet port on the controller or from a pxi network card? 

You have configured the port to be an ethercat port in MAX?

You do have 24V powering the EK1100?

[Paul_Tyler]

I am running on a separate PXI network card.

It is configured as EtherCAT in MAX, and if I connect directly to one of my probes I can add the probe as an existing target in LabVIEW.

The EK1100 is powered, and the full system (EK1100, 4xEK1122, and IFC2451s) is detected and mapped by Beckhoff's TwinCAT software.

The ESI file is 'Beckhoff EKxxxx.xml' for both the EK1100 and the EK1122.

Are you using EK1100 or EK1110 as the coupler? Your posts mention both.

[Paul_Tyler]

I'm not sure what has changed but today I have a different set of symptoms. If I add my EtherCAT Master to my project I get all the other devices added as well (EK1100, EK1122's and IFC2451) but the topology is wrong. The attached view LV1.GIF shows what LabVIEW gives me. The IFC2451 slave device is shown as being in the top level device chain, but it should be attached to Device 2 (EK1122). When I run my VI I get this message "An error occurred while attempting to switch the I/O scan mode. The distributed clock could not be enabled because the master could not read the network topology. This could be caused by a slave device having an improper connection to the network."

The other symptom I have is that if I right click on any of the EK1122s there is no 'New...' option in the context menu.

Any ideas?

[Paul_Tyler]

I think I am being affected by a known issue: 236792. It has been around for a long time so I am surprised it hasn't been fixed yet.

[David-n-MO]

Sorry i haven't responded sooner.  I was hoping to have more information for you.

I am using the EK1101 (sorry for the prior dyslexia)  which is the same as the EK1100 except with an adress switch on the side.

the attached file shows the ethercat portion of the project.

I will be working with it today and I hope I'm not up the proverbial creek without a NI locomotive device.

[Tonyzhang]

    Hi, I got a cRIO9074 for the vehicle control, I want some global variable saved in theTDMS file, a program as the attachment, after running ,there is no Error Out, and I can

see the data flow when running. single-shot operation show no error too, but in thepath ‘c:\DT.tdms’, that in the disk C of my laptop, I can not find the TDMS file, No error occur, but I can not find the TDMS file….Please someone help urgently i need to get it done for my project work   

      3Q