We are currently using the NI cRIO as a master and ELMO’s servo motor driver (third-party) as a slave for motor control through EtherCAT communication.
After completing the cRIO network setup according to (http://www.ni.com/product-documentation/10555/ko/), I imported the XML file to add the slave (Elmo motor driver) and created the master-slave structure according to (http://www.ni.com/product-documentation/10555/ko/) successfully. Using the Softmotion of NI and the getting started example provided in the SDI toolkit, I have checked that the motor is moving in position and velocity mode. I think that EtherCAT communication itself has no problem.
We confirmed through the ‘NI Softmotion Drive Interface Plug-in Feature Compatibility’ that the minimum possible scan period is 2ms when running an Elmo drive through NI Softmotion. We wanted to work with a shorter scan period, We want to make my own communication programming VI between the EtherCAT master and the slave without using the provided Softmotion.
Is there an example where there is communication between NI's EtherCAT master device and any type of third party slave that includes successful programming VI for PDO input/output without using Softmotion library. Or, is there any other hardware product that needs to do this?
The key point is to enable EtherCAT communication without using Softmotion.