General diagnostics

Import Device description File DFF (.xml)

If a slave can´t be detected by a network scan or if it is not present in the Device Catalog, it´s commonly the case of not choosing the correct file type upon importing the ESI file in SyCon.net.

Please make sure to choose EtherCAT DFF, whilst importing the salve´s salves description file:

Master specific diagnostics

LED state

The LEDs on our master hardware have a wide variety of states to get a first hint of what might be the issue:

Topology Error

One of the most crucial parts and often the cause of issues is the cabeling cabling / topology of the EtherCAT network. Our master firmware is really strict about proper topology.

For EtherCAT every slave has an IN and an OUT Port and the master has a Main and a redundancy port.

The cabeling cabling should be done as follows:

The master´s masters Main port is connected to the first slave´s slaves IN port and the OUT port of the first slave is connected to the IN port of the second slave and so on.

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For this document a network with two slaves was chosen:

Network Scan

Before doing a Network Scan please unplug the cable used for cable redundancy (green). After loading the configuration to the EtherCAT master, it can be plugged back in.

For the current EtherCAT master Stack, cable redundancy is always activated and configured by default.

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If you pay close attention you will already see the mismatching topology now.

Sycon.net Diagnosis

If this isn´t noticed or if the network is build incorrectly by hand the error: 0xC0CD0043 "Topology error detected" will be shown in the general diagnosis:

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To determine the difference between the configured and the real topology use the Diagnosis and do a "Online Comparison". This will also show, if all the device descriptions used match the real hardware, according to the parameters: Vendor ID, product code and Revision.

Configuration does not Match

If you get one of the following Errors: 0xC0D5001D or 0xC0D5001E or 0xC0D5001E it means either the Output or the Input Configuration does not match.

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In the then opened window click "Start Upload" and wait until it finished. This may take a minute or longerseveral minutes.

You can now compare the Online and Offline Data to spot the difference in Process Data fe.eg.:

In this case the slave was configured, in the master (offline), to have 200 Bytes Input but the Slave itself (online) had only an input date length of 150 Bytes. 

Other Error Codes

All Error Codes from 0xC0D50001 to 0xC0D500F0 are a direct reference to the standardized "AL StatusCodes" ranging from 0x0001 to 0x00F0.

Slave specific diagnostics

LED state

As for the Master the Slave Stack will also show it´s current state via the LEDs:

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