Polishing Machine

Solution

Q&A with Customer

Question: Please provide a description of your application/machine?
Software Engineer: The machine emulates a large belt sander with an X-Y table under it that polishes stainless steel vents and grills. Due to concerns with belt wear, it was desired that the axes move in an oscillating pattern to utilize the entire belt surface. In order to keep the process speed up and not burn the part, the axes were also required to move in a continuous fashion without stopping. The customer also required a standardized programming method that wouldn’t require custom programs for each of their 1000’s of frame sizes.

Question: Why did you select RMP EtherCAT Motion Controller for your application?
Software Engineer: The utilization of the PVT move allowed a sine wave with bezier corners to be implemented for the axial movements. With the need for a complex motion shape to be generated, it was desired to use a powerful programming environment such as Visual Studio for the calculations. By integrating the development environments for the path calculations and the motion control, it was much easier to stream and interface the complex motions between these two functions while still monitoring and controlling ancillary functions such as belt pressure and speed during the moves through multi-threading.

Question: Describe your development experience using RapidCode API motion libraries:
Software Engineer: The motion libraries were very well documented and very complete. There were a number of application questions which I also had that were answered very quickly by Robotic Systems. This was a complex application but the libraries and code provided in the API was very easy to implement and work with.

Question: Were there any motion controller feature(s) that stood out to you?
Software Engineer: Ease of use even in such a complex environment. In most motion control applications the motion controller can be difficult to use and code. It can be almost impossible to integrate into a multi-threading platform without complex and error prone multiple processors and communications.

Question: From your experience, is there anything about the product or company that could be improved?
Software Engineer: RSI and the API met and exceeded my expectations, I cannot remember any issue that wasn’t resolved immediately by their support team or any functionality that wasn’t provided in their API and support programs.

Overall Feedback: RSI makes a great team member for development of motion applications!

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