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By Karen Auguston Field, Managing Editor -- Design News, January 18, 1999
Smoovy gets a big brother
Two years ago, RMB introduced smoovyTM, a precision brushless dc micro motor with an OD of a mere 5 mm. Although it has been received with enthusiasm, says RMB engineer Jeffrey Perkins, some designs aren't ready to make the downward leap--so to speak. "Engineers were saying, 'How do I get connectors? How do I solder it? There's nothing small enough out there for me.'" Perkins explains that after losing two or three jobs because of the motor's minuscule size, RMB scaled up the original design, producing the relatively gargantuan NEWsmoovyTM. The miniature (as opposed to micro) brushless dc motor has an 8-mm OD and develops a peak or holding torque of 0.15 oz-inches (compared to 0.022 oz-in for the original smoovy). RMB
Product Code 4590
Compact digital drive is hot ticket
"Engineers love it. In fact, it's one of the hottest products that we've had come out of the gate," is how Carroll Wontrop, a senior product manager at Kollmorgen, describes the SERVOSTARTM CD, a smaller, more compact version of the popular S-series digital drive. What is noteworthy about the product, says Wontrop, is that it's a full-featured microdrive, despite its small size. "You can use it with traditional rotary type servomotors, which is what a lot of engineers do, but you can also use it with linear motors as well as with direct-drive motors," he says. To make retrofit applications easy, Kollmorgen engineers designed in all of the same connections as the S-series. Another feature is the choice of multiple control algorithms (Pole Placement, PI, and PDFF).
Kollmorgen Motion Technologies Group
Product Code 4593
Motor controller manages four axes
If your application requires motion control with a fair number of I/O points and you want to be "quick to motion," Baldor Electric's latest motion controller, the NextMove BX, is a logical choice. So says Drive Specialist R.J. DiMaggio, who calls the new controller a kind of "big brother" to the company's popular SmartMove controller. "Engineers were telling us they really liked SmartMove, so we extended the concept with NextMOVE BX, which offers up to four axes of servo or closed loop vector, more than 500 points of I/O, and two serial ports." The new controller uses a floating point digital signal processor (DSP) running at 32 MHz, delivering high-speed performance and high accuracy. Machining is a major application. "We supply components to a multitude of cut-to-length processes, for example," says DiMaggio, "Now with NextMove BX, we can take care of the infeed and outfeed functions out of the same box."
Baldor
Product Code 4589
Microstepping drive packs a wallop
Crave power but lack space? If you do, check out the IM804 microstepping drive from Intelligent Motion Systems Inc. It supplies 600W of bi-polar power from a unit measuring only 3 @ 2.75 @ 1.3 inches in size. An upgrade from the company's popular IM483 product, the IM804 accepts high voltage (from 24 to 75V) and provides a per-phase output current of 4.0A rms and 6.0A peak. A 5V switching power supply on-board makes heat dissipation in this tiny unit a non-issue, says Applications Engineer Kevin Wall. The unit has 14 built-in microstep resolutions (400 to 51,200 steps/revolution) in binary and decimal, allowing engineers to change resolution on-the-fly.
Intelligent Motion
Product Code 4591
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