Replacing Softmotion to Control KOLLMORGEN Servo

[ThanksForAllTheFish]

So I inherited a LabVIEW 2018 project that needs to be upgraded to LabVIEW 2023. Right now we are controlling a KOLLMORGEN servo motor with a KOLLMORGEN AKD over EtherCAT using Softmotion. What would the best way to control the servo with the minimum amount of damage done when ripping out and replacing all the Softmotion stuff.

[Kyle97330]

I've never used EtherCAT for LabVIEW before, but I did look into it as an option once when we had a choice of protocols but decided to use a different one (MODBUS).

The only option I found was to use a 3rd party library made by Ackermann:

Creator's site 

NI download page for the same toolkit 

This is not a free library, which is one of the reasons we didn't use that protocol since our device had multiple control options.  I never tried it so this isn't an endorsement or advice against it... it's just the only option I know about for you to consider.

[ThanksForAllTheFish]

So it looks like this has not maintained as when I tried to install it it would only go up to 2016 LabVIEW and was looking for a 32bit version. I will have to look for a library that has EtherCAT in it as I did not realize that EtherCAT was not in LabVIEW 2023.

[Bob_Schor]

You might take a look at TENET Technologies.  I believe this may be where the SoftMotion team at NI went when NI dropped this product.  I'll send you a Private Message.

Note added:  My PM "bounced".  Seeing that you are a "New Member", you might not have enabled receipt of Private Messages.  I recommend you update your Profile and turn on Private Messages, and then send me one (to Bob_Schor).

Bob Schor

[rolfk]

NI also has a driver for Industrial Automation Toolkit for EtherCAT. I was involved with a project that used this driver ca 2017/2018 on an Industrial Controller from NI, a higher end RIO hardware than cRIO bit still in a compact housing.

Setting up EtherCAT to work with the various non-NI hardware was not very trivial. Much of it was trying to figure out what the NI parser did not like about the 3rd party configuration files and even when it finally was willing to load them, several things didn’t go as automatically as when you setup a system on a TwinCAT controller, but it eventually worked.

This was however basic EtherCAT access through the NI Scan Engine with a maximum update rate of 1ms, but we used 5 or 10ms as the controller got otherwise taxed to much and would not allow to do all the other tasks such as an Industrial camera streaming pics over a GigE connection in realtime, controlling various power supplies, laser meters and other devices all in parallel.

You would then have to replace SoftMotion to do things like trajectory control, acceleration and deceleration and more things and translate that into the EtherCAT parameters provided by your Kollmorgan device. Not a trivial task for sure.