Help with EtherCAT ESI upload into cRIO project for Siemens Modular Device Profile

[tistheczn]

Hello everyone,

I am currently working with the Robox EtherCAT card with a Siemens CU320/S120 dual motor setup and looking for guidance when configuring the ESI in twinCAT and then importing the ESI file into a labVIEW cRIO project. The issue I am having is after I setup the EtherCAT slave configuration in TwinCAT following the procedure outlined in section 2.3 of the Siemens EtherCAT users manual (https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/attachments/109757300/109757300_EtherCAT_Interface_SINAMICS_...) and I export the configuration file from twinCAT to upload into my LabVIEW project, LabVIEW is unable to read in the ESI xml file.

The Sinamics xml is a modular device profile, according to this NI article in the note under step4 since it is an MDP I must upload both the Sinamics xml and an ESI to describe the two modules into my project. When attempting to load in the generated xml file I get the error from NI "the slave profile does not reference the module profile" which prevents me from communicating to the drives through the cRIO-9047. Any advice on what I may be doing wrong during setup that causes this error?

Through the labVIEW project I am successfully able to change the state of the CU320 between PreOp, Op, init, etc. when using the "online device state" in the project but I am unable to read in PDOs/SDOs.

Thanks for any help!

[tistheczn]

I have fixed this issue and found that it was an issue with the exporting method of the ESI from TwinCAT. FWIW the correct export method for getting an ESI out of twinCAT to be read into labVIEW is to click on the drive object in the tree then go to "CoE - Online > Advanced ... > create SCI" then uncheck "SCI-file" and then in the "File-Name" text box replace the .sci format with .xml