Content

• Introduction
• What is EC-Engineer Web?
• Set-up EC-Engineer Web
• Running EC-Motion Advanced on real-time Linux
• Summary

In our daily work, we see that humanoid development is a major global trend. The NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin plays an important role in accelerating this technology. This powerful AI and edge computing platform continues to push technical limits and enables a new level of development.

Since humanoids are mobile applications, wireless solutions are becoming increasingly important. While EC-Master software is running on the MainDevice, EC-Engineer Web can be remotely connected for diagnosis purposes.

In this blog, we take a closer look at EC-Engineer Web. What advantages does this application offer, and how can it be set up?

Finally, we run drives on Linux to demonstrate how motion control, real-time capability, and robotics come together in humanoid development.

EC-Engineer Web is a powerful software tool for configuration and diagnosing EtherCAT networks. This web-based application provides functionality similar to  EC-Engineer. The application is able to create and export ENI (EtherCAT Network Information) files, which are essential for EC-Master to initialize and control the EtherCAT network. Beyond configuration, EC-Engineer Web offers significant diagnostic capabilities. The network can be monitored, variables can be forced, the states of the MainDevice and individual SubDevices can be viewed, error counters can be displayed, and many additional features are available. For example, the integrated “Mismatch Analyzer” can detect deviations between the configuration and the connected network, helping simplify EtherCAT network setup and installation. EC-Engineer Web uses a standard web browser as its user interface and can connect to any MainDevice running Windows or Linux.

For our application, the system architecture is shown in Figure 1. On the MainDevice side, Linux runs on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin together with EC-Master. The business logic of EC-Engineer Web consists of the same core logic and ENI engine used by EC-Engineer. In addition, the application includes an ASP.NET Core web application that enables a dynamic web interface.

Figure 1: System architecture of EC-Engineer Web

On the MainDevice, EC-Engineer Web can be easily installed using setup packages for Windows, Linux, or macOS. After opening a shell on the Linux tegra-ubuntu computing module, we navigate to the appropriate folder and start the application using the following command (Snippet 1).

./EcEngineerWeb

Snippet 1: Starting the application EcEngineerWeb

Once started, the application runs on the MainDevice and is ready to accept a connection, as shown in Figure 2. EC-Engineer Web can now be accessed from any browser via localhost on port 5000.

Figure 2: EcEngineerWeb is ready for connection

After starting the EcMasterDemo on the MainDevice, EC-Engineer Web can connect to the system. Using the web-based interface, all relevant data can be visualized in standard browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, or similar.

To determine which IP address the browser should connect to, start by identifying the network interface used by EC-Master for EtherCAT communication. Using the ifconfig command, it is determined that Ethernet adapter eth2 is used, and the corresponding IP address can be read, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: command ifconfig lists the ethernet adapters

The user then gains an overview of the system, as shown in Figure 4. The current state of the MainDevice, the number and status of SubDevices, and current memory usage can all be monitored.

Figure 4: General information in the application EcEngineerWeb

EC-Engineer Web also grants access to the CoE object dictionary. This tab displays all relevant system data, as shown in Figure 5, including hardware and software versions, identification data, IDs, limits, and configuration settings.

Figure 5: Access to object dictionary on the EcEngineerWeb

To demonstrate actual motor motion, we now turn to EC-Motion Advanced. This add-on for EC-Master provides motion control functionality for drives based on the CiA 402 profile, according to the ETG Implementation Directive ETG.6010. The example application EcMasterDemoMotionAdvanced supports the Cyclic Synchronous Position (CSP) and Cyclic Synchronous Velocity (CSV) operation modes.

Before starting the application, several real-time settings must be configured on the Linux system. This includes configuring the RT-PREEMPT kernel, loading the acontis real-time Ethernet driver, and integrating the atemsys kernel module. A detailed description of these steps can be found in one of our recent blog posts.

After configuring the real-time environment, we start the EcMasterDemoMotionAdvanced application. For this example, the DC servo-drive AcceInet BE2 from Copley Controls is used with two brushless step motors including an encoder as shown in the figure 6 below.

Figure 6: Mechanical and electrical setup

The application is started using the command shown in Snippet 2.

./EcMasterDemoMotionAdvanced -intelgbe 1 1 -f eni.xml -b 1000

Snippet 2: Starting the application EcMasterDemoMotionAdvanced

The application uses the real-time Ethernet driver for Intel Gigabit network interfaces. The ENI file defines the SubDevices and their parameters using the -f eni.xml option. For this test, the cycle time is set to 1 ms using the -b 1000 option.

After startup, the application scans the SubDevices and transitions the network to Operational state, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7: Operational mode

With the motors rotating, access to variables in the PDO image provides valuable insight into system behavior. As shown in Figure 8, the actual motor velocity of one drive can be monitored directly.

Figure 8: Access to the PDO on the EC-Engineer Web