Hello;

I've been working with an EtherCAT force/torque sensor for research applications, which has a sample rate of 3000 Hz. I need to figure out how to accurately get the data from the sensor with the correct sample rate. Unfortunately, nobody in my lab knows how to use EtherCAT or any similar protocols.

So far, I've been trying to use Beckhoff TwinCAT to do this, but no matter what I do, I cannot get a sample rate better than around ~33 Hz; rewriting the code to try and get the data at a higher sample rate either gives me multiple copies of the same sample, or else causes crashes and BSODs.

I'm really not sure how else I can do this, so any assistance would be appreciated.

 

What is the vendor and model of the EtherCAT force/torque sensor?

It's entirely possible that the EtherCAT cycle time is independent from the sensor's force/torque sampling. In other words, the sensor may be sampling every 333 microseconds and calculating a force/torque process value. But your EtherCAT master is simply reading the calculated process value from the sensor.

Now that being said, if for some reason you do need to read each and every sample taken for your application, EtherCAT is fully capable of sub-100-microsecond cycle times (of course, to abide by the Nyquist sampling theorem you'd have to have a cycle time below 167 microseconds to reliably read every sample). However, the ability of TwinCAT to be able to do this depends on your hardware, such as whether you have an Ethernet NIC supported by TwinCAT's realtime driver (https://infosys.beckhoff.com/english.php?content=../content/1033/tc3_overview/9309844363.html&id=).

Perhaps if you could provide some additional context on what you're trying to do with the force/torque readings, we could provide more appropriate recommendations.