Copley TE2 Ethercat Drive

[EricLarsen]

Hi All,

Very new to Ethercat devices, so hoping some one can tell me if I'm missing something obvious.

I have a 6 axis stepper control system that uses a cRIO-9024 and 6 NI-9512 stepper controllers.  The system is getting a bit old, and with NI getting out of the motion control field the customer asked me about a possible upgrade to the system.  Since the old system used Softmotion and NI released Softmotion for Labview 2020, my feeling was that new controllers compatible with Softmotion should work with minimal changes to the existing software.  Based on what I read Ethercat drives may be a good way to go.

 

According to the NI website, Copley TE2 Ethercat drives are compatible and should work for our existing stepper motors. I installed all the NI Ethercat and SDI drivers and got the TE2 ESI files from the Copley website.  Starting with the NI SDI Plug-In example, I can link to the new cRIO (9049), and it can apparently see the TE2 drive, but when I go to bind the Softmotion axis to the TE2 drive, it doesn't show up.  I've run out of ideas, and since NI doesn't do motion anymore they couldn't help.

Anybody have any suggestions?