User, 18 Oct 2026: use an EtherCAT based system. - Spindle and conveyor on the StepperOnline A6-EC100L2A1-M17 kit (100 W, A6-200EC drive, USD 123.29), spindle through a 1:6 belt in cyclic synchronous position, conveyor in cyclic synchronous velocity. - The A6-EC drive has no divided encoder output, so an RS-422 incremental encoder on the spindle shaft clocks both line-scans; its index goes to the drive touch probe for one angle reference. - Station controller: fanless N100 mini PC with 2x Intel i226, NixOS PREEMPT_RT, EtherCAT master EtherCrab (Rust, MIT/Apache) first, IgH (nixpkgs, igc native driver on 6.12 LTS) as fallback; no PLC. - EtherCAT I/O: EK1100, EL1809, EL2809, EL3102 (warp lasers sampled with the spindle position, ~1,000 points a turn at 1 ms). - Safety stays hardwired (safety relay, contactor; no STO at 100 W). - Edge PC with the GPU stays off the real-time loop. - BOM: drives, encoder, controller and I/O lines with sources; total USD 16,112 to 32,938 (THB 0.53M to 1.09M). Next step: EtherCAT bench. - Investor render: cabinet and outfeed labels.
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1.5 MiB
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