Our next two-day product school is Thursday July 17, 2014 through Friday July 18, 2014. If you are new to Galil, sign-up now! The training will be at our headquarters in Rocklin, CA (near Sacramento).

In systems with absolute encoders and brushless motors that are being driven by a sinusoidal drive such as the D3540/D3640  or DMC-30012, you can take advantage of the absolute position information  to commutate the system at power up without using BX or BZ.  Instead, you can measure the phase relationship and then run a #AUTO routine using that relationship to automatically commutate the motor

Our next two-day product school is Thursday February 6, 2014 through February 7, 2014. If you are new to Galil, sign-up now! The training will be at our headquarters in Rocklin, CA (near Sacramento).

Loss of an encoder can result in the motor running away unconditionally with brush DC motors or trapezoidal commutated brushless motors.  This is a dangerous situation in motion control systems.  With Galil sinusoidal brushless servo drives, encoder loss will not cause a runaway condition and it is possible to have an emergency controlled move to a safe position.

Introduction

The use of linear motors for precision motion applications has increased as technology has improved.

A linear motor typically uses a servo drive with sinusoidal commutation to minimize torque ripple and provide quiet smooth motion. It is also becoming more common for linear motor manufacturers to provide position feedback in the form of an analog sin/cos encoder as this method uses the signals from the motor magnets and is more cost-effective.  Galil motion controllers now provide options for sinusoidal drives and interpolation of sin/cos analog feedback for smooth control of ultra-high performance applications.

For users that need to expand their IO across multiple devices, Galil Ethernet based controllers have a built-in Master/Slave capability.  This means that if a system has an Ethernet based DMC motion controller yet needs to add one or more RIO units to expand the IO capability, the DMC controller can be set up to reference the RIO inputs and outputs automatically.  Likewise, if a system needs to have multiple RIO Pocket PLC units - any one of those units can be set up as the "Master" controller such that it automatically references the i/o of all of the slave units.  The only limits to this are  the number of Ethernet handles that the master RIO or DMC unit has available. (Note: use the TH command to see how many handles a particular product has available).

Introduction

This article provides a more advanced introduction to the Galil COM library. Specifically event based execution will be introduced using the three COM library events, onRecord, onMessage, and onInterrupt. The example will guide users, with minimal experience, to build the following application.

In this application, the GalilTools COM library is used in conjunction with Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 to develop a user interface for the Galil controller. The goal is to create a simple interface that features both directional buttons for mouse interaction and the ability to poll for keyboard input. Using this digital stimulus, the application is to act similar to an analog joystick control interface. The completed user interface is visible below.

Occasionally, it is beneficial to create a user-defined command set that can be received over the serial port and interpreted at an application program (.dmc) level.  The code below uses the "Communication Interrupt" feature of the Galil controller to accept characters over the serial port, parse them, and process specific parts of an on-board dmc program.  The code uses a modified "prompt" tha