Control for mid- to high-volume multi-axis motion
A
Micromech product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Dec 7, 2005
The PMac2-PC/104 from Micromech Systems delivers motion control for mid- to high-volume multi-axis motion control systems.
The PMac2-PC/104 from Micromech Systems delivers motion control for mid- to high-volume multi-axis motion control systems.
It comprises a small-format version of the PMac family of controllers from Delta Tau.
These were the first motion controllers to use DSP technology.
The PMac2-PC/104 can be applied directly to analogue servos or pulse-and-direction stepper drives, and with an optional piggyback board it can support direct-PWM pure digital control.
For applications using a series of boards in the PC/104 form factor, the controller can be installed in a PC/104 stack or act as a stand-alone controller with serial communications.
This includes RS232, USB or Ethernet.
Because it uses standard PMac2 firmware, it has all the software capabilities of any PMac2 controller.
The board uses integration to achieve its small form factor, the main board having only three main components - the Motorola DSP CPU with embedded RAM, the servo ASIC and flash memory backup.
It supports four channels of servo/stepper interface, an RS232 serial port and an optional PC/104 bus port.
Digital inputs and outputs that are not used for their dedicated purpose can be used as general-purpose I/O yielding up to 12 outputs and 24 inputs for each set of four channels.
An expansion board lets this be increased to eight servo interface channels with optional added digital I/O capability, including a link to hundreds of external I/O points.
The board enables the use of one of two high-speed wire communications interfaces either USB or Ethernet that can be used with or without dual-ported RAM.
Another option provides digital I/O capability with an eight-input and eight-output port that directly connects to an Opto-22 PB16 or equivalent I/O driver board.
A multiplexer port can interface to hundreds of I/O points on PMac's ACC-34 family boards or be used directly as eight inputs and eight outputs.
There is a handwheel port with two supplemental machine channels.
Each of these can be used as a quadrature encoder input or a pulse-and-direction/single-phase PWM output for motion or process use.
This board lets the PMac2-PC/104 be used as a full-fledged machine tool controller with the PMac-NC software.
Applications include: grinding the corrective lenses for a deep space telescope with sub-nanometric resolution; moving massive land based telescopes; and operating the world's fastest pick-and-place machines.
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