Driving StepperMotors by CanOpen or RS485

Does anyone have experiences in driving a steppermotor by the CanOpen protocol ?

I found a motor like this one http://de.nanotec.com/plug_drive_motor_pd2o41.html

I know there are a lot of possibilities to drive the motors by arduino board etc. but i don´t want to have the cable chaos an i want to be able to drive the motors over lang distances as well. This is why i was searching for motors with integrated controller.
As i saw the CanOpen protocol is using normal ethernet cables as a connection for the control data. This would be perfect cause i want to use a lot of this motors at the same time. i have in mind thet i can build a network to control all motors at the same time.

Just a dream ?

Does anyone have an idea of how to generate CanOpen to control stepper motors by CanOpen protocol to vvvv ?

Any other idea of contolling a bunch of stepper motors is wellcome as well.

Thnak you !

Hi stephan and vvvvorum,

I’m interested too in driving a motor via CanOpen protocol, did you find any solution ?

Thanks you by advance

Fairly pricey but I’ve you can use one of these http://www.zappautomation.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=498 to control up to 100 of these http://www.zappautomation.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=582 with these attached http://www.zappautomation.co.uk/index.php?cPath=9

That first device is a rs232 to canbus controller and they provide reasonable documentation of the protocol used. It’s then just a case of correctly formatting some serial commands and you’re away!

Although you can buy cheaper drivers (2nd part) than the one I linked to, I recommend getting one with advanced motion control as the device can then be programmed to take care of acceleration and deceleration curves which are pretty essential with steppers. Otherwise you need vvvv to take care of these tasks which is not fun with a restricted framerate and over serial.