Development of independent EtherCAT slave module and application to closed loop step motor drive with multi-axis

Recently, as real-time Ethernet based protocols, especially EtherCAT have become more widely used in various fields such as automation systems and motion control, many studies on their design have been conducted. In this paper, we describe a method for the design of an EtherCAT slave module we developed and its application to a closed loop motor drive. Our EtherCAT slave module consists of the ARM Cortex-M3 as the host controller and ET1100 as the EtherCAT slave controller. These were interfaced with a parallel interface instead of the SPI used by many researchers and developers. To measure the performance of this device, 32-axis closed loop step motor drives were used and the experimental results in the test environment are described.