Proven CNC Control with EtherCAT

The de­vel­op­ers of Eck­el­mann AG have im­ple­ment­ed an Ether­CAT® Mas­ter in the com­pa­ny’s stan­dard E°EXC 66 con­trol. Drives can now be con­trolled di­rect­ly via Ether­CAT from the proven CNC con­trol.

The unique tech­ni­cal fea­tures of the E°EXC 66 have proved re­li­able al­so in this up­grade: Due to its pre­cise tim­ing per­for­mance, the Ether­CAT® Mas­ter it­self func­tions as a dis­tribut­ed clock mas­ter. With full con­trol over the bus clock, the con­troller keeps the sys­tem clocks’ de­vi­a­tions from each oth­er with­in the nanosec­ond range. Es­pe­cial­ly in high-pre­ci­sion CNC op­er­a­tions, this is of paramount im­por­tance. The syn­chro­nized par­al­lel op­er­a­tion of Ether­CAT® and CAN is now pos­si­ble. What de­serves par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion are the au­to­mat­ic bus scan and the au­to­mat­ic ini­tial­i­sa­tion of the drive con­trollers, which save the us­er time-con­sum­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion ac­tiv­i­ties. CAN over Ether­CAT® (CoE) is sup­port­ed as a drive pro­file.

To­geth­er with Eck­el­mann’s CAN and ser­cos III so­lu­tions, this de­vel­op­ment cov­ers a large se­lec­tion of im­por­tant field bus­es. Users of the new Ether­CAT® ver­sion will, of course, ben­e­fit from the proven fea­tures of the E°EXC 66, its par­tic­u­lar­ly high EMV re­sis­tance as well as its low pow­er con­sump­tion and re­duced pow­er dis­si­pa­tion. The close in­te­gra­tion of firmware and ap­pli­ca­tion—a typ­i­cal fea­ture of Eck­el­mann—fa­cil­i­tates tech­nol­o­gy-spe­cif­ic ad­just­ments and the im­ple­men­ta­tion of cus­tomer re­quire­ments. With­in its range of CNC ap­pli­ca­tions, Eck­el­mann of­fers a wide spec­trum of tech­nol­o­gy-spe­cif­ic func­tions and the in­te­gra­tion of spe­cial kine­mat­ic sys­tems, es­pe­cial­ly in the ar­eas of cut­ting tech­nolo­gies, pro­file pro­cess­ing as well as han­dling.

[info]www.eckelmann.de[/info]