[EcCiA402Drive] Status switching and random rebooting on ABB drive

[bordeegit]

Hello, I'm working with an ABB motor and drive, using the generic EcCiA402Drive plugin.

Everything is working, I'm able to send commands and read states of the drive, but duing the startup, the behivor of the drive is erratic.
It takes numerous swithing between Drive States to reach OP status and it randomly restarts the configuration after ~20 seconds; after that the system seems to be stable and works as expected.

It seems to me that the problem is some sort of de-synch between the master and the drive, but I wasn't able to fix the issue.

In the attachments you can find the launch file, the terminal output after running it, the dmegs output with ethercat debug 1 and the config file for the drive.
Launch file and config file have been converted to .txt to be attached here

Thank you in advance for any help!

dmesg_output.txt
terminal_output.txt
ABB_ESM13B_config.txt
motor_drive.launch.txt

[pzanne]

Hello,

From the kernel message we can see the error:
[ 1025.392449] EtherCAT ERROR 0-0: AL status message 0x0032: "PLL error"
which can indeed be linked to a synchronisation problem. We can also see from the console outputs that your system is not real time and that you are working at 100Hz. In these conditions, synchronisation is very difficult, if not impossible. As a first step, you can deactivate synchronisation by commenting the line:
assign_activate: 0x0300
in your configuration file and see how the system behaves.
You can also see from the console outputs that the driver goes into fault mode:

[ros2_control_node-1] STATE: Fault Reaction Active with status word :527
[ros2_control_node-1] STATE: Fault with status word :16904

As you have enabled auto fault reset: auto_fault_reset: true, the driver tries to reset the error but it occurs several times before disappearing.
Can you disable auto_fault_reset and look at the value of register 0X603F (Provides the error code of the last error which occurred) with the command :
ethercat -p 0 upload -t uint16 0x603F 0X0
and look at what it corresponds to in your documentation.
One last remark concerning your interpolation period (register 0x60C2, 0X1 and 0x2), if you are working at 100Hz you need to set :

0x60C2, 0X1: 10
0X60C2, 0X2 : -3 

The current values in your config file correspond to a frequency of 4kHz, as the driver does not receive the ethercat frame at this frequency, this may explain why it gives an error.
Best
Philippe

[bordeegit]

Thank you for your help Philippe.

After additional investigation, the error you saw at activation and resets refers to "Power base is not ready" on the drive side, meaning that EtherCAT is trying to turn on the motor while other activation procedures are taking place. I don't think it's a real problem, since it's simply waiting for the drive to become available to activate it. I didn't find any other way to delay the sending of the "Enable operation" control word after a certain status word, but let me know if you have any suggestion.

As you pointed out, the main problem seems to be the high frequency of the interpolation period. Unfortunately, even if the drive manual states otherwise, it doesn't seem possibile to modify the registers in 0x60C2:01 and 0x60C2:02; any value different from 250 and -6 respectively throws an SDO abort message 0x06090030: "Value range of parameter exceeded". error. I contacted the manifacturer (ABB) for technical support.

I also modified the kernel of the board with a realtime (release 5.15.0-1080-realtime) and tried your suggestion to remove the assign-activate line: the random resets seems to have disappeared, but the cycle time of 10 ms is not as stable as i wished. Moreover, in the future I'd like to drive 4 motors togheder, so this other syncronization method is not sustainable long term.

I looked though the driver code and i could find only the following accepted entries to the .yaml configuration file:

• vendor_id
• product_id
• assign_activate
• auto_fault_reset
• auto_state_transitions
• sdo
• rpdo/tpdo
• sm
  Is there a place where I could find the documentation for the all the possibile entries of the .yaml file?

Thank you again.

[qleonardolp]

Is there a place where I could find the documentation for the all the possibile entries of the .yaml file?

This might be helpful:
user_guide/config_generic_slave.rst
config_use_case_motor_with_gear_box

On these links there is good examples of .yaml files that may suit to your configuration.