Change address number to Beckhoff ethercat slaves in LabVIEW project

[jurpe]

I am exploring ways of integration of Beckhoff Ethercat slaves in our control program running on cRIO 9074 Ethercat master. We would like to have multiple ethercat slaves for example Beckhoff EK1100 with several I/O modules (El2008, EL1008 ...) - Daisy Chain connection. When I import current configuration into Labview project everything is OK and working fine. But if I add on more I/O module to one EK1100 (for example El1008) the modules listed in the project after that do not work anymore. I have to rearrange all the configuration in the project to make it work once again. This is not very useful, flexible and expandable for the future of our application.

One of the solutions may be to have some free addresses between Ethercat couplers. Let say that first EK1100 would have the Address 0, the next would have the Address 100 and so one. By doing so we would have free space for adding up to 99 I/O modules without changing the program and configuration to the modules that already exist in the project.

Is there a way to do that in the LabVIEW?

Any other suggestion for solving this would be very appreciated.

[Zenon_K.]

Hello Jurpe,

Have you tried editing the XML file you use for your Ethercat device? Also, could you please attach the XML file?

Thanks!

Zenon

[jurpe]

Thank you for the reply Zenon.

I did not look in the XML files of the ethercat slaves. I hope that this has nothing to do with XML of ethercat slaves because we are planning to use several slave couplers which will all be of the same kind and of course they will all have the same XML file in LabVIEW project.

The XML files are in the attachment.

What I tried is to change the Address of the ethercat slave in the LabVIEW project - right click on the ethercat coupler -> properties -> EtherCAT:BASIC (see the picture LabVIEW_project.jpg in the attachment). I deployed the changes successfully. After that in the LabVIEW project that coupler state was disconnected - right click on EtherCAT Master -> Online Master State...

If you would have more than one NI 9144 Slave Chassis for EtherCAT and you would like to change the Address to one of that you would have the same problem. So the solution to this would probably be also useful for me.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

[DirkW]

Could you try LabVIEW 2010 and ECAT 2.1? I am asking because we fixed some really bad issues with Beckhoff devices in 2.1 which unfortunately needs LV 2010. Your problem sounds like one of them.

DirkW

[jurpe]

The development machine has LabVIEW 2010 SP1, NI RIO 3.6.1 and ECAT 2.1 drivers.

I am not sure that changing address in the properties of the ethercat slave is the right thing to do, but this was the only thing that I could think of.

Any other suggestions?

[jurpe]

Hi. Is somebody from support still considering my question?

Thanks.

[Zenon_K.]

Hi Jurpe,

sorry for not answering, I somehow missed the notification about your post :-/.

Anyway - did you try changing the address in the properties as you suggested? Did it help? I'll look for some other ideas and let you know if I find something new.

Have a great day!

Zenon

[DirkW]

I checked with the developers and for now we do not support adding slaves in the middle of the chain. We only support adding them to the end of the chain. I have put this to the feature request list that we have internally to consider implementation for one of the next driver versions.

For now the only solution would be to add the modular beckhoff device to the end of the chain if you plan to add modules to it later.

DirkW

[jurpe]

Thank you.

Consider that we have 10 bus couplers each with several I/O modules. One coupler for control panel, one for controlling pneumatic valves, one for array of motion detection sensors ... If I would like to add one button to control panel in the worst case I would have to add one input module and that would cause the reallocation all ethercat devices in the software. For each machine we produce we would have different software and this would be a nightmare for supporting our customers.

Please, consider to implement this functionality soon.

Thanks.

[ChuckS]

Agreed!

This is a support nightmare 🙂 Beckhoff modules cannot simply be added to the end.

When we have issues with RT we have to wipe out the configuration in project explorer.

It doesn't always come back the same way. This makes it very difficult to get a system back up ....

-Chuck