General

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 salves description file:

Master

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 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 cabling should be done as follows:

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

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.

If you now do a network scan by right click on the cifx card → "Network Scan..." it will look like this:

The first slave is the Baumer Encoder and the second slave is the netTAP 151, as expected.

If you were to switch the IN and OUT connection on the Baumer Encoder a scan will look like:

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

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:

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 it means either the Output or the Input Configuration does not match.

To check, what is internally configured in the EPROM of the slave versus what´s configured via SyCon for the master, right click on the troublesome slave → "Connect" → "Configuration" → "Online Parameterize"

In the then opened window click "Start Upload" and wait until it finished. This may take several minutes.

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

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

LED state

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

Most Errors have to be determined via the master.