benalbsp - 2021-11-26

Dear community,

I am using CodeSys V3.5 SP16 in order to control some motor drives with a master EtherCat. The manufacturer of the drive hardly recommends to enable the distributed clock in order to achieve good performances when several slaves try to perform complex motion synchronously (which is our case). They recommend to use the master mode with SYNC 0 enabled with the cycle time equal to the EtherCAT communication (3mS on our case), the shift time at 0 and the SYNC 1 disabled.

So I have configured the slave and the master as shown on the following screenshots.

The issue is that I do not know how to measure the efficiency of enabling this feature. I do not see any difference either on the target sent to the drive or on the target view from the drive when the feature is enabled or not.

Another idea to check the efficiency of the distributed clock would be to compare the timestamp of the slave. But I do not figure out how to plot it on a graph. I can see the value increase on "online COE" but it do not work when I try to assign a variable to it and try to plot it..

It would be really helpful if someone has already faced a similar issue or has an idea to solve it.

Thanks in advance!

Ben