Hi,
It would be nice to have a Etercat master card on the RMC200.
Controllers Delta can already be used for projects that mixte hydraulic actuators and electric actuators. In those situation we use dummy drives controlled through Delta analog outputs. But it would make a more modern setup to control them through Ethercat.
It would also allow Delta controllers to read/write to Ethercat remote I/Os in smaller projects that do not require a PLC.
Thanks
Jean-Francois,
Thank you for the feature request. An EtherCAT master is something we have been considering. As time goes on, it becomes more difficult to find dummy drives, and an EtherCAT master would certainly improve the ease of implementing the RMC in electromechanical applications. This is something that is actually on our roadmap, but we are not able to give any firm timelines on our development.
-Jacob
To add to this, having the RMC200 as an EtherCAT slave would be ideal for us, as we have standardized to Beckhoff controllers with EtherCAT. How close is Delta from having EtherCAT cards for these controllers? I received an update from Peter that progress towards that was made, but that was at least a year ago.
We are currently working heavily on an EtherCAT master for the RMC200. We have no firm deadline, but my guess is that it will be released early next year.
As for a slave, we don’t really have any firm plans on that, but if enough customers demand it, then we will certainly consider it. Do converters or other protocols work at all for communicating from a Beckhoff PLC to an RMC?
We could make it work, sure. Plenty of gateway devices to use, both 3rd party and Beckhoff, plus there’s Beckhoff’s software EtherNET IP scanner that we can use to communicate to the RMC. But…it would be nice to have everything on EtherCAT, which is always our goal when spec’ing out our machines. In fact, we won’t even consider most 3rd party devices (controllers, drives, etc…) unless they include support for EtherCAT.
Thank you. Your requests have been duly noted. May I ask why we are so fortunate as to receive your business even though our controllers do not yet support EtherCAT?