Hi,

I followed the instructions posted here http://wiki.ros.org/Industrial/Tutorials/Simple_EtherCAT_Network_IO to set up an Ethercat connection. Some links seem to be a outdated, but most instructions are still relevant and worked for me. I was able to install Orocos and establish a connection with a Robotiq gripper, but I was not able to create Ros topics, which should be done by the last two lines in test.ops provided in these notes:

 # This command remaps OROCOS topics to ROS topics 
 stream("Master.Slave_1002.bits", ros.topic("DI")) 
 stream("Master.Slave_1003.bits", ros.topic("DO"))

The error I get from this is "Parse error at line 25: Service or Task "Deployer" has no Peer or Service ros (or Deployer was not found at all)" (line 25 is the first of the above two lines and the script works fine for the rest when I comment these lines out). I suspect that some imports and the parts relevant for integrating Orocos/Ros are missing (perhaps a package from the from rtt_ros_integration stack?), but as I am new to Orocos and thus the connection Orocos/Ros, I don't know exactly how I should fix this.

My question is, how do I remap Orocos topics to Ros topics for this particular case? I already downloaded the rtt_ros_integration stack which compiles fine. However, if I look in the source code of soem_master I don't see much usage of the rtt_ros_integration packages, which is what I believe needed to connect Orocos to Ros. Is something missing here to integrate Orocos with Ros? Also, I'm not sure whether the following could have caused some problems:

- Instead of using the link http://www.ros.org/wiki/orocos_toolchain_ros, I followed the instructions at http://wiki.ros.org/orocos_toolchain to build orocos.

- http://git.mech.kuleuven.be/robotics/soem.git is offline, I believe that it moved to here: https://github.com/orocos/rtt_soem. I got all the code for Soem from here.

For now I will try to find out more about Orocos and the rtt_ros_integration_stack to fix this, but the documentation I found so far is scarce. Also, if you know of alternatives for controlling a Robotiq Gripper through Ethercat in Ros I also consider that as a solution. I believe that Ros-I only supports the TCP/Modbus and RTU/Modbus versions at the moment. Please let me know what you think, thanks in advance.

Best, Wilson Ko