Programming drives without using a PLC

Bosch Rexroth's pre-configured drive systems are designed to measure and test machines and shorten the initial commissioning to just three minutes for National Instruments' CompactRIO control hardware and the LabVIEW programming environments without one line of PLC code.

By Bosch Rexroth August 27, 2015

Bosch Rexroth’s pre-configured drive systems are designed to measure and test machines and shorten the initial commissioning to just three minutes for National Instruments’ CompactRIO control hardware and the LabVIEW programming environments, which are combined with servo technology. Using a jointly tested and established interface, machinery manufacturers can program motion sequences in LabVIEW without a single line of PLC code.

Rexroth has preconfigured drive systems with the IndraDrive Cs control devices IndraDyn S servo motors. The IndraDrive Cs kits cover the torque range from 0.56 Nm to 19.8 Nm in finely scalable increments. In addition, Rexroth supports custom drive solutions for torques up to 631 Nm. The IndraDyn S synchronous servo motors can meet the requirements of protection class IP54 or IP65. Depending on the precision required, the motors are equipped with encoder systems for standard or precision requirements.

Using the interface CAN over EtherCAT—jointly aligned by National Instruments and Rexroth—the CompactRIO control directly accesses the servo drives as master. Manufacturers can program process and motion control via the graphical programming environment LabVIEW, which is designed to make any additional PLC programming redundant. The plugin SoftMotion Drive Interface (SDI) required for IndraDrive Cs can be downloaded and installed directly from the LabVIEW development environment. For the initial start-up of IndraDrive Cs drives the user only needs to enter a small number of application-specific values. Graphical programming of movements can then start right away in LabVIEW. 

National Instruments (NI)

Engineer Ambitiously – NI 

Bosch Rexroth

www.bosch-rexroth.us 

– Edited by CFE Media. See more Control Engineering motor and drive products.

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– Added coverage from NIWeek 2015 is linked below