[etherlab-users] Brushless DC Motor Controllers

[Thomas W. Nelson]

On Jan 3, 2014, at 9:55 AM, Sebastien BLANCHET <blanchet at iram.fr> wrote:

> Dear Dave,
> 
> There are (at least) two kinds of EtherCAT servo drives:
> 
> Type 1: CoE (CAN over EtherCAT)
> for example: Kollmorgen AKD, Beckhoff AX2000 and Elmo GOLD families
> 
> Type 2: SoE (SERCOS over EtherCAT)
> for example: Beckhoff AX5000 family
> 
> I think that both are difficult to learn because the documentation
> is available only for TwinCAT.
> 
> ---
> sebastien
> 
> On 01/02/2014 09:11 PM, Dave Scheinman wrote:
>> After much fumbling around I've successfully managed to get Etherlab up
>> and running and talking to a Beckhoff EK1100 with some Digital and
>> Analog I/O.  Ultimately I would like to use Ethercat to control some
>> brushless motors.
>> 
>> Companies like Advanced Motion Control and Elmo make Ethercat drives in
>> the current/voltage range I am interested, but I am open to other
>> suggestions.  Does the Etherlab community have a suggestion on which
>> vendor's drives will provide the most seamless integration with Etherlab?
>> 
>> The Beckhoff hardware has pre-made Simulink blocks provided with
>> Etherlab but I am unclear how to go about creating these blocks for an
>> arbitrary servo drive.  Is this documented somewhere?
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> ~dave

I was able to get Copley Controls AE series drives working for a client in only a few days a while back (Etherlab master 1.5.0/1.5.2) with the CANOpen documentation and some EtherCAT app notes available from Copley's web site, plus a couple of phone calls to their techs for clarification.  Ran 4 axes successfully using the Etherlab user example as a starting point on a PREEMPT_RT patched 3.x Linux kernel.

Tom Nelson
Consulting Engineer
Granite Computer Sciences, LLC
Milford, NH



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