Pack Profile interoperability demonstrated

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 13, 2004

The Sercos interface trade associations will exhibit a Pack Profile interoperability demo at Pack Expo 2004, from 7th to 11th November, in Chicago, Illinois.

The Sercos interface trade associations will exhibit a Pack Profile interoperability demo at Pack Expo 2004, from 7th to 11th November, in Chicago, Illinois.

The exhibit, demonstrating interoperability of Sercos interface products from multiple vendors, will be in the OMAC Packaging Workgroup booth, number C-67, strategically located in the concourse entrance to upper level McCormick Place North.

The demo features controllers from Automation Intelligence, Beckhoff, Bosch Rexroth and Rockwell Automation each running servo drives from those four vendors plus servo drives from Danaher Motion.

The controllers and drives all conform to the Sercos interface Pack Profile, a subset of the Sercos interface functions defined for packaging machinery to improve the multivendor interoperability of servo controls and drives.

The Sercos organisations developed the Pack Profile in response to a request by the OMAC Packaging Machinery Working Group.

The demo illustrates the benefits to the packaging machine builder and end user of using the Sercos interface (IEC61491) and PLCopen (IEC61131-3) international standards, plus OMAC guidelines for interoperability such as the PackML state model with PackTags.

PackML standardises machine states, modes, commands and data.

After Pack Expo, the Sercos interoperability demo will be exhibited at the SPS/IPC/Drives show from 23rd to 25th November 2004 in Nuremberg, Germany.