Sending live pose data from Kawasaki E02 controller to Beckhoff IPC via EtherCAT

    Hi RobotForum!

    I need to send my Kawasaki BX130X's live TCP coordinates to a Beckhoff PLC. I have the EtherCAT communications card installed and am successfully communicating with the PLC. Requirements:

    -Max delay: 500ms

    -Precision: +-1mm, +-0.1 degrees

    My plan is to map the TCP coordinates to 75 IOs (2^13=8192 digits each to represent +- 3000mm for X,Y,Z axes and 2^12=4096 digits each to represent +- 180.0deg for OAT). I would update these IOs in a PC program running constantly in the background once the robot boots.

    Before I spend too much time implementing this (I am relatively new to AS programming so it might take a few days), I'm wondering if anyone knows of any easier way to do this, or if you think that this plan is fundamentally flawed? I wasn't able to find any pre-built functions in the AS manual.

    Many thanks,

    Mykal

    What is it with people wanting more elegant solutions.

    If it works and ticks all your boxes........why is elegance so important.... :hmmm:

    KISS it...........Keep it Stupid Simple.

    Good to hear, simple IO exchange when you have the fieldbus correctly configured and allocated is always the simplest method, but has it's limitations when it comes range values.

    You could always try TCP/IP instead if you have a server setup for communicating that way, but that would take more than 30 minutes to get going but would work just as effectively.

    I agree with keep it simple stupid approach.

    My only comment would be that it's using allot of I/O. If you were constrained and had limited I/O, you can make your code more elegant by multiplexing the signals by using the same 13 bits for the data and say 4 bits to identify which data is being sent and then finally 1 input and 1 output to do a 3 way handshake for the data exchange.

    So basically you'll end up with the same result using 18 outputs and 1 input on the robot side.

    You would have to verify that you can do the data exchange within 500ms but with a fast enough RPI on PLC and robot side in the order of 1-2ms or less, I highly doubt it would take longer than 500ms to multiplex the data.

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