[etherlab-users] Danaher Servostar S600 - Summary

[Jens Kotlarski]

Hallo everyone,

You may remember that we tried to realize a communication block for a
Servostar S600 (Danaher). We had quite lot problems but finally it works.
Therefore, let me shortly summarize what we did and where the problems were.
It may be helpful for some of you:


Just a few words about our system at the beginning: we used etherlab 1.2,
etherCAT master 1.4 and Matlab2008a on an Ubuntu system.

At the beginning we were unable to set our Devices to OP. It turned out that
the ec_slave2.c cannot handle sync managers with a control byte 0x22 (it
says that the regarded sync manager is whether an input nor an output).
Therefore, we simply changed the control byte to 0x20 defining an input and
it worked. Unfortunately, we still were not able to set the state to OP
because we did not respect the sample time of our Simulink model. In our
case the sample time has to be set less or equal to 1ms (we should have read
the manual :-)). So finally we achieved the OP-state and were able to set
the hardware enable of our devices. 

BUT, as trying to set the software enable we failed. After some phone calls
and wireshark sniffing we realized that we only send zeros to the device. We
tried a couple of things to fix this problem, like different kernel
configurations, different gcc versions, and finally different Matlab
versions. At the end it worked fine using Matlab2006b (it did not work with
Matlab 2007b and not with Matlab2008a (that are the versions we tried...)).
The problem is that the newer Matlab versions generate wrong c-files from
the Simulink models. The inputs to the blocks are missing in mdl_update.
That's not just the case for our device but also for the other entire
"template"-blocks that are included within the etherlab library. So it seems
that etherlab has a serious problem with the newer Matlab versions
concerning the code generation which should be fixed...

So finally, using etherlab 1.2, etherCAT master 1.4 and Matlab2006b we can
use our devices without any problems...

Thanks for all your hints and help!


Best regards

Jens

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Dipl.-Ing. Jens Kotlarski

Leibniz Universität Hannover
Institut für Robotik (IfR)
Appelstr. 11a
Ger - 30167 Hannover

Tel. : +49 (0) 511 / 762 - 4116
Fax  : +49 (0) 511 / 762 - 19976
Email: kotlarski at ifr.uni-hannover.de
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