Did You Know?

Use a motor as a generator, you say? Surely those are completely different things. Turns out, they aren’t. If the motor is driving the load, it’s a motor. If the load is driving the motor, it’s a generator. Most of the motor applications I work with involve point to point position control: in getting from Point A to Point B, the motor must accelerate to some speed, then decelerate such that the motor speed reaches zero just as we arrive at Point B. During acceleration, energy is supplied to the motor as it drives the load.

 All Q programmable drives provide digital inputs that can be used singly or in combination. In programs where only a single input must be examined the TI (Test Input) command is commonly used. The TI command can be used sequentially to test many inputs one right after the other, but it can be cumbersome to create a decision tree in this fashion. A better method may be to bit-wise AND the I/O register. The result is a number that represents the ON & OFF conditions of only the inputs of interest.

Applied Motion Products has delivered our first IP67 compatible motor! An OEM found our new line of brushless DC motors and performance matched drives to be the perfect choice for their project - with one exception, one BIG exception. The motor needed to survive full immersion in liquid for a 24 hour period.

Large format 3D printer manufacturer 3DP Unlimited had an incredible showing at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in January. Because of their ability to print large items to scale and not just in miniature, 3DP Unlimited set a new bar for additive printing capabilities and garnered a great deal of attention from the press.

You probably already know about the excellent networking capability of the Applied Motion Products DC stepper offering. Did you know that Applied Motion also has CANopen, EtherNet/IP Modbus RTU, and the ASCII based Streaming Command Language (SCL) networking options for the SV7 Series DC servo amplifiers? Additionally, Modbus TCP/IP is just around the corner with a scheduled release in Q1 2015.

Applied Motion Products has always prided itself in developing easy-to-use products, including both hardware and software. Programmable drives can turn what would otherwise be a basic stepper or servo drive into a very smart independent controller that will auto-execute a customized Q program upon power up and react to numerous input conditions, including digital inputs and motor position feedback. This type of technology has been around for years here at Applied Motion.

Brian Mason, Regional Sales Engineer – Southwest

Applied Motion Products is like an iceberg. At the tip, you know them to be a renowned manufacturer of high-precision, cost-effective motion control products. Below the surface however is where the real action is! Advanced algorithms such as step smoothing filters, harmonic waveform smoothing and electronic damping propel our technology ahead of the curve. Let’s dive into these technology characteristics with competitor data analysis to showcase why ours is better.