No SDO Communication Using CAN over EtherCAT (CoE) with 3rd Party Slave

Question

Dear all
We are trying to establish an EtherCAT communication between a cRIO 9024 as EtherCAT master with a 3rd party frequency comverter (bmaxx 4432) as EtherCAT slave. CanOPEN over EtherCAT is industry standard.
The slave device has a CAN in Automation (CiA) configuration 402, i.e. motion and drives. Thus it has a well configured address range, input/output parameters and the like. The frequency converter remains in INIT mode and waits for a PDO definition, sent via an SDO communication. 
In LabView, adding an EtherCAT master in the cRIO system works fine. Adding targets and devices on the configured EtherCAT master also works fine after we imported an XML description of our third party EtherCAT slave. LabView detects the slave type and the version correctly. Thus, there must already be a rudimentary EtherCAT communication working between LabView and our 3rd party slave.
The problem is that we cannot establish a first SDO communication.
Every description I found was about using CANopen on a CAN bus hardware (e.g. NI 9861) plugged into the cRIO. Descriptions concerning EtherCAT are usually concerning an NI cRIO 9144 extension as slave, which is not what we have.
The NI CANopen library seems to definitely require the NI 9861.
Is this correct?
1)
Either it should be possible to define a kind of virtual CAN port based on the EtherCAT port, on which we can write to and read from with the NI CANopen library. This would be the preferred solution so we can use the CANopen VIs.
Is there a way to do this?
2)
Otherwise, there should be a possibility to establish a more basic SDO/PDO communication directly based on the EtherCAT interface.
Are there any NMT/SDO/PDO VIs available to do the programming?
Is there a manual document which would describe how to start the first communication setup via EtherCAT (CoE)?
My sincere thanks for any advice you can give.
Many cheers
 Markus

Answer 1

Dear all,
I'm trying to establish a connection between a cRIO9068 and a BM 3300 via CoE.
I already had a hard time establishing a normal EtherCAT-connection.
Finally I could set the Scan engine to active, and I was able to get from "ini" and  "pre operational" into "Safe operational" and "operational".
As I can see, you had similar problems as I do.
When I add my cRIO to my project (with the EterCAT-master)  I can look for the slave device, and add it to my project.
Within this slave device, I can add two mods, as seen in the attachment.
These slots should include all the parameters, the drive provides, but actually I only end up with some "position mode" -parameters, I think those are the SDO's.
If I add these to a VI, the cRIO scan engine switches to configuration mode, but can't switch back to active mode.
Actually, the Baumüller slave device should be able to provide multiple parameters for read and write.
I can see them, wehn I go to "online device state" in the rightklick menu of the slave device (Parameter.png), but there's no way I can actually use them.
I can't add these "slots" on every computer.
On some computers it's possible, on some it isn't.
Thanks for any advice, you can give.
Yours sincerely
Karl
Attachments:
slot 1.PNG ‏6 KB
slot 2.PNG ‏9 KB
Parameter.PNG ‏46 KB