NI controller communicates with IEEE 1394, CANopen intelligent drives

Austin, TX; Rochester, NY— National Instruments (NI) reports that engineers can now use its LabVIEW graphical development environment to create distributed motion applications with its SoftMotion controller for Copley CANopen and Ormec IEEE 1394 intelligent drives. The controller is a soft motion interface between NI-Motion driver software and distributed intelligent drives.

Users can program IEEE 1394-based ServoWire SM drives from Ormec and CANopen-based Accelnet and Xenus drives from Copley with the NI-Motion API in LabVIEW. They also can prototype distributed motion applications using NI Motion Assistant.

With these new controllers, engineers in semiconductor, biomedical, textile, packaging, and other industries can use NI’s programmable automation controllers (PACs), such as industrial PC- and PXI-based hardware, for their distributed motion applications. NI adds that a distributed motion architecture offers many advantages over centralized motion, including simplified cabling with lower setup and maintenance costs. With the SoftMotion controller, engineers also can use NI’s PACs to incorporate vibration monitoring, Web connectivity, and high-speed analog I/O into distributed motion applications.

SoftMotion runs on LabVIEW Real-Time ETS for Copley CANopen drives and LabVIEW Real-Time RTX for ORMEC ServoWire drives. NI-Motion 7.0 driver interfaces between SoftMotion and the development environment on Windows 2000/XP. In addition to using LabVIEW with NI Motion Assistant, engineers can program the NI-Motion 7.0 driver in LabWindows/CVI, Microsoft Visual Basic and C programming environments.

Control Engineering Daily News DeskJim Montague, news editorjmontague@reedbusiness.com

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