We are starting up a new machine with AB Kinetix 5700 drives in dual loop. We selected Heidenhain endat scales for the secondary feedback, which is all officially supported by AB. On the first axis is worked great, on the second one we've been struggling for a few weeks to get it to work. It's been escalated a few times by Rockwell, and the answer today was that we need to disconnect the data lines and run the scale as pure Sin/Cos - no absolute feedback. Here's the e-mail:
It's clear that there is a firmware bug in the drives, but I find it incredible that they don't have any interest in fixing it. We found other related technotes with Rockwell support that indicate that this bug has been known for several years. There are tech notes listing our encoder as being compatible with this drive, and nothing publicly available saying that it won't work.
Be warned!
So unfortunately it seems the drive was not designed to support absolute EnDat encoders over 1 meters in length. I will find out if that parameter is going to be increased in future releases. But for now your only real option is to use the encoder with the Data channel disconnected, essentially making it an incremental device.
It's clear that there is a firmware bug in the drives, but I find it incredible that they don't have any interest in fixing it. We found other related technotes with Rockwell support that indicate that this bug has been known for several years. There are tech notes listing our encoder as being compatible with this drive, and nothing publicly available saying that it won't work.
Be warned!