forum.cncdrive.com

In an old post https://forum.cncdrive.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=3879 (from around 3 years ago), I saw that an ethercat board is in development. Has anything moved in this regard? I'd love to see this as an option, since it would offer a significant upgrade for my machine and overall for UCCNC as a whole. Leadshine produces really affordable ethercat drives that are quite good and have some more sophisticated motion control allowing much smoother and more accurate operation. On top of that the whole wiring is much more noise resistant and simpler to manage. Step/dir controllers are pretty much a song of the past and I think most professionally made modern machines don't use them anymore.

Nothing moved in this regard unfortunately.
We had a working prototype, but the development of this got paused when my collegue Dezsoe got ill.

Thank you for your answer. I think having this board would offer you a significant advantage on the market. Are there any plans to roll it out or is it indefinitely postponed for now?

That project is on the backburner now, we working on some other new things like releasing a new BOB, releasing a new UC100, fixing some minor bugs in UCCNC, designing a new BOB for the UC300ETH.
I think we can get back to the EtherCAT project probably in about 6 months or so.
It is not forgetten, I mean it is a very interesting development, but it is so complex that we want to complete the currently running developments before getting back to it again.
The death of my collegue Dezsoe slowed things down, but we not stopped developing.

My condolences I can imagine this is a very complex undertaking and it will take time until it gets released. However, once it does, I think it will be a real gamechanger. I've had lots of issues with HBS57 hybrid steppers lately and I figured I could do much better with Ethercat and was even considering moving to LinuxCNC for that, but if there's a real chance such a board might appear in a year or so, I think I will wait.
There seems to be basically nothing easy to setup on the market with Ethercat that doesn't cost thousands. I did some research and there are some Mach 4 third party boards/extensions and then you have the whole MESA ecosystem for LinuxCNC but that seems much harder to setup than UCCNC and even though I'm a programmer by trade, I'm a bit intimidated with trying that. Then finally you have standalone controllers that have ethercat, but they usually cost many times more than anything UCCNC or Mach 4. There's also the Acorn Hickory, but the price ($2000) is really steep and the GUI is some of the ugliest, most offputing and poorly designed ones I've ever seen. I think they tried really hard to mimick standalone controllers from 90s to make it look more "pro", and it just hugely reduced the readability and usability.