Hi All On 25/6/20 9:23 am, justin White wrote: > Linuxcnc has a hal driver for ethercat master as it doesn't require > any special hardware. Ethercat slaves AFAIK require an ASIC and it's > pretty expensive. I hear alot of talk of ethercat but rarely see it > actually used in industry. I don't know the status of the hal ethercat > driver in MK but if it's not there why can't it be added (meaning what > does it have to do with Beaglebone specifically). As for the slave, > Not really sure I see why you would use a BB as a slave but it sounds > like it's not practical. If this was something I were gonna use I'd be > glad to have a smart serial channel or 2
EtherCAT is used extensively in industry, a signification number of the CNC controllers now only support EtherCAT servos and IO. The cost of using EtherCAT for CNCs has dropped significantly in the last 5 years with a number of smaller suppliers of servo hardware producing products. Companies like LNC (www.lnc.com.tw) and Moon Industries (https://www.moonsindustries.com). My family business has been using EtherCAT hardware on our wool sampling machines for the last 7 years. Its totally changed how we think about our machines and the way forward. I can say with 100% certainly that we would not be making our machines any more if I had not found EtherCAT eight years ago. Now for the purposes of making a BBB MachineKit board which make the job of controlling my DIY / semi-commercial CNC. I'm not sure. It would be cool. But do not dismiss the idea out of hand. The ASIC's are not that expensive and there are other suppliers out there who are interested in having there chips/products used by DIY. One of these is https://www.bausano.net/en/hardware/ethercat-e-arduino/easycat.html or https://www.bausano.net/en/hardware/ethercat-e-arduino/ethercat-and-raspberry.html Cheers All Mike -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to machinekit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/machinekit/bdc77d18-aa6d-aad6-9c61-80f867c6bef8%40gmail.com.
