Controllers
November 22, 2010
By
Mary Del
The new family of the SPiiPlus EtherCAT controllers from ACS Motion Control are designed to address the needs of high-performance machinery with multi-axis motion of up to 32 axes and soon up to 64 axes. The SPiiPlus EtherCAT Master enables users to link together up to 32 axes of drives and many I/O modules made by ACS Motion Control, as well as third-party EtherCAT modules that have been qualified by ACS and comply with the CANOpen Over EtherCAT (CoE) protocol. All axes on the EtherCAT network are fully synchronized to a 20-kHz sampling and servo update rate with a time jitter of less than 0.1 microseconds. Currently, ACS offers a family of EtherCAT master controllers: SPiiPlusNT – EtherCAT master control plugged into MC4U multiaxis drive chassis; SPiiPlusNTM – Standalone EtherCAT master controller; and SPiiPlusSC – PC-based (software) EtherCAT master controller. A full software development suite with tools for motion programming, eight channel scope with data logging, system setup configuration, and graphical servo analysis accompanies and supports all products within the EtherCAT product family.
