Newly available from Micromech is Delta Tau's Turbo PMAC Clipper, a feature-filled, highly cost-effective multi-axis controller. Based on the Turbo PMAC2 CPU, the Turbo PMAC Clipper provides a single board with four axis servomotor or stepper motor control with 32-digital I/O points and choice of Ethernet or RS232 communication ports. It is easily expandable to eight axes with a small daughter board.
By combining multiple functions such as motion control, high-speed communication and I/O management on a low cost single board, the Clipper controller substantially improves performance and reduces overall cost per application, delivering 'affordable automation'.
The single board controller provides four axes of simultaneous control (with as little as 0.1 ms update time), expandable to eight axes. All axes can operate independent or coordinated in any combination. Features include multitasking of up to 16 motion programs and 64 asynchronous PLC programs, and programming in an easy-to-use, high-level language.
The controller offers linear, circular, rapid, B-spline and Hermite-spline interpolation modes, with true S-curve acceleration and deceleration for jerk-limited profiles. The Clipper features dynamic multi-move lookahead for robust acceleration control, and coordinate system translation and rotation, 2D and 3D. There are embedded forward and inverse kinematics routines for Non-Cartesian geometries, and tool-radius compensation. Hardware position capture and compare circuits ensure high precision.