Landmark birthday for Mint motion language
A
Baldor product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Oct 21, 2003
The Mint motion control language is celebrating its 15th anniversary.
The Mint motion control language is celebrating its 15th anniversary.
Created in 1988 by the UK startup Optimised Control - now part of Baldor Electric Co - as an accessory for some novel motion hardware ideas, the language has proved to be the enduring factor in the company's international success.
Mint's English-like commands - which inventor Mark Crocker borrowed from his student experience of Basic in the UK on computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Home Computer - was a revelation to a motion control community used to programming with mnemonic codes.
With high level commands such as "print" and "speed", interpreted execution for "instant" results, and other "advanced" features like user-defined variable names, motion control programming started to become accessible to just about any engineer or technician.
Thousands of machinery and automation OEMs and engineers worldwide use the language today, which in its 15th year has reached version 5 and incorporates around 100 man-years of code.
"It's the softer side of motion control - simplicity and ease of programming, configuration and setup - that we see making a big difference to automation project efficiency, timescale and cost", says Mark Crocker, now Marketing Director of Baldor UK.
"Many motion companies still focus a vast amount of effort on hardware - with the result that some software tools today really can be considered as still in the stone age.
Hardware is important of course, but the really big gains in motion today are in areas such as ease of development and setup, human-machine interfacing, connectivity and portability".
Mint stands for "motion intelligence".
During its 15-year development, Mint has gone through two major evolutions.
The first came in 1994.
While developing the language for the release of Baldor's 32bit real-time control platforms, Baldor reworked Mint in the form of an embedded C library, providing much greater flexibility for programmers.
DLL (dynamic link libraries) and later ActiveX components were developed to provide enormous flexibility for system developers.
Applications could be developed in Mint, embedded C or PC languages such as C++ and Visual Basic - and all with a common API (application programming interface) A second leap forward came with the release of version 5 in 2001, which added multitasking capability and other high-level modular programming features such as functions and procedures, and compatibility with ActiveX components.
It additionally took the company's long-standing developer's "workbench" onto a completely new plane.
One of the new features was a function called SupportMe.
This automatically collects information such as the version of Windows and service pack that's running on the developer's PC, plus numerous technical details of the motion controller hardware, for e-mail to a Baldor support engineer when there's a technical issue to discuss.
Mint now boasts several hundred high-level keywords to simplify the development of both motion and all the other control, networking and HMI tasks on automation.
"What gives me most pleasure is that Mint is one of just two or three recognisable software brands in the motion control market", adds Crocker.
"I see it mentioned on engineers' resumes.
I don't think that would have been the case if we had stuck with the first name we thought of, which was BIFMOC (Basic interpreter for motion control)".
"Our industry is evolving fast, we're starting to see many more dedicated software engineers getting involved, and these individuals want to use the kind of tools they've trained with at college and university", he adds.
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