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IEEE 1588 Synchronization to cRIO-9030 and cRIO-9074 with third party embedded PC

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Hello community,

 

In my Lab I have three Controllers, which are connected through an Ethernet switch to my PC. 

Two of the controllers, NI-9030 and NI-9074, are from National Instruments and the third one is from Beckhoff. I have successfully set a communication between them but the clocks on these controllers are not synchronized. I need to synchronize these clocks for deterministic results.

From the information acchieved on this article, I have tried using NI-TimeSync18 (Software support) on NI controllers. NI-9074 works on VxWorks OS, therefore one can use MAX to enable and disable IEEE 1588 protocol (BMCA=MasterSlave). On the other hand, NI-9030 works on Linux OS, therefore I have configured IEEE 1588 protocol (BMCA=SlaveOnly) by using "Monitor and Configure Time Reference VI". 

 

My question is: How can I synchronize all there controller to the same clock time? Since both NI controllers does not have in-built TSN ethernet port, what is the best way to synchronize my system?

 

If somebody have experienced this kind of problem then please help. I thank you in advance for your help.

 

Regards

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Hi Harry,

 

 

Actually, you've made all of the necessary steps to obtain IEEE 1588 with software support synchronization between cRIO controllers.

Unfortunately, I don't know how this is implemented in Beckhoff but I've checked that they got IEE1588 synchronization modules which may be additionally needed in your hardware configuration (I bet that your Beckhoff controller is driven by non-deterministic Windows). This should give you an option to enable Software-based PTP. I'm not sure about this and I think that you should get additional information from their support or community forums.

 

Kind regards

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Accepted by topic author Harry_Hayer

Hi Grafo,

Thanks for your reply. I asked the technical support and they have a particular PTP EtherCAT terminal EL6688. The terminal has a external RJ45 Ethernet socket, to which one can provide a private IP address and Subnetmask. There is a very good documentation on how to use EL6688 on Beckhoff website.

Then I have set the second Ethernet (et1) Port on cRIO-9030 on a private network by setting the same static IP address and Subnetmask (using MAX) as I had set on EL6688. NI-TImeSync use by default the first Ethernet port (et0) as synchronization source. Therefore I had to change the setting inside NI-TimeSync json file. Additionally, one can also configure the type of the used PTP profile and the BMCA mode.This Website provides all possible json file configurations.

When all done, then I had my PTP synchronization. The status on LabVIEW is checked by using "Monitor and Configure Time References.vi". 


Regards,
Hayer

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