[etherlab-users] EtherCAT master never sees slaves; link state stays "DOWN"

[Soo-Hyun Yoo]

Hello,

A coworker and I are picking up where others have left off in developing
software for a robot using EtherCAT for communication.

We are working with four EtherCAT slaves connected to a master node running
on a Zotac ZBOX nettop with a Realtek 8169 ethernet card. Our wiki page
describes our setup: http://code.google.com/p/atrias/wiki/NettopBuild.
Basically,
we are running 32-bit Xubuntu 10.04, using kernel version 2.6.32.11 with an
RTAI patch.

Our problem is that when we start EtherCAT master using /etc/init.d/ethercat
start, the master never sees the slaves. This is the output in dmesg:
http://pastebin.com/HyTMTWpP. Here is the entire dmesg output:
http://pastebin.com/YLXSMr9k

After "EtherCAT 0: Starting EtherCAT-IDLE thread.", nothing happens. Nothing
I do with /opt/etherlab/bin/ethercat shows up in dmesg (e.g., rescan should
show a message saying, "Scanning bus...", but doesn't). The green ethernet
port activity indicator lights, which should blink rapidly, are idle.


We've tried a lot of things (shooting blindly half the time), including the
following:

   - Recompile kernel with various modules enabled/disabled.
   - Recompile RTAI after each kernel recompilation.
   - Recompile EtherLab master after each kernel recompilation, with the
   addition of "--enable-cycles", "--enable-generic", "--enable-eoe",
   "--enable-debug-if", and "--enable-hrtimer" in various combinations.
   - Set up everything (per wiki instructions) on a completely fresh
   machine, with the same results. (So it is possible that our wiki is missing
   a step or two.)


If it helps any, we do have an MSI nettop with an EtherCAT master that can
at least see the slaves, though it has problems involving timeouts (topic of
another question I posted a few days ago). We've been trying vainly to
figure out what makes the MSI machine work, because as far as we can tell,
both machines have the same Realtek ethernet card and have had the same
compilation options for RTAI and EtherLab.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? We are completely stumped on what to do
next. What other information could I provide that would help you help us?

Soo-Hyun Yoo
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