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Motion Control Round-Up
News and Views from the World of Automation.
 
March, 2008
In This Issue
And the Winner is
What's New?
Can You Solve This?
What's in a Name?
Join Our Mailing List!
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Last Sunday was Easter and so many people were confused by this year's early Easter date, that I couldn't resist a short explanation.  Generally Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon, after the vernal equinox.  The earliest it could occur is on March 22 and the latest is April 25th (based on a Western calendar).  The last time it happened on March 23rd was in 1913 and the next time it will be this early is in 2160.  So there you have it.  If you want to know more about this holiday you can link here.
 
Now with Easter and the vernal equinox behind us we can look forward to lengthening days and warmer weather (unless, of course you are south of the equator).  So take a minute to relax and read through our monthly newsletter and drop me a line if I can be of service.
And the Winner Is . . .
Switcomm Wireless Link
Regular readers know that we've been running a contest for the best new idea of how to use our wireless interface and the results are in!  The three finalists are:
 
James Linstedt who had the idea to use it as part of a remote weather monitoring station for wind speed and direction where it would be high on a tower and would have power supplied through the tower lighting circuit for continuous operation.

Next was Ken Hilke who thought that it could be used to transmit position information to a robotic arm from encoders placed on the arm joints of a human operator so that the robotic arm could mimic human arm movements.

Gustavo Columbo saw the potential to use the wireless system with power tongs on an oil drilling rig. Encoders on the tongs help monitor the torque/position curve of mating pipe sections to ensure a good mechanical connection. This is a tough environment where cabling is a huge problem.

May I have the envelope, please?  And  . . . congratulations to Ken Hilke who will be receiving the cool wireless network detector T-shirt shown below.  And thanks to all of you who wrote in with your clever ideas.

BEI
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What's New?

Here's a pretty cool deal for some of you.  As you know we all live in a digital world - but sometimes we have to interface to the good, old-fashioned analog world. Now you can have the best of both worlds: the precision of digital with an analog interface.  Several of our absolute encoders, H25, HS35 and HMT25 (multi-turn) are all available with an analog output.

H25
Whether your interface requires a 4 - 20 mA input or a 0 - 10 volt input, we can help. Our analog output encoders are based on our field-proven 12-bit absolute encoder design, internally converted and scaled for standard analog ranges.  One revolution of the encoder equates to a full-scale analog input giving a precision position indication with a resolution of 4096 steps.
 
Read more about this option and download a PDF by clicking this link.
Can You Solve This?
 

This problem came to us recently and involved a little bit of trickery to solve.  At first it didn't seem possible, but after some thought we came up with a clever approach.  Here's the customer situation.  A conveyor retrofit was in process and the customer needed to have the ability to feed product onto the conveyor at different feed speeds according to a fixed ratio.  All of this needed to be synchronized to a master motor that was going to be used to reference the motion of all of the conveyors.  How did we do it?

Answer:  A high resolution encoder was used for the master encoder to provide synchronization.  This output was fed into a 4-to-1 encoder broadcaster module with count down circuits on each of the outputBroadcaster channels.  The countdown options allowed the operator to select fixed countdown values from 2 to 256 on each of the outputs independently.  Using this scheme it was possible to set a wide array of belt speed ratios for the different product being run.  Since countdown values were set using DIP switches they could also be changed for different set-ups. To get a PDF for the broadcaster click on the picture at right.
What's in a Name?
You can't always tell what something is just by it's name.  Camel's hair brushes, for example, actually use the hair of squirrels, fox, goats or ponies. How about panda bears.  They aren't bears at all and Camel bald eagles, well . . . they actually do have a covering on their heads.  In fact, if you ever wanted a list of "misnamed items", you can find one right at this link.

Armed with this information, you can amaze your friends with your arcane knowledge, be the life of the cocktail party or win a bar bet. Good luck with that.
I hope you found something that was fun, interesting or informative about this month's newsletter.  Remember, we want to make you a success in your automation projects, so let us know if we can help.  Consider us to be a part of your design team.
Thanks for reading,

Scott Orlosky
 
    email: Scott Orlosky
    voice: 805-968-0782
     web: http://www.beiied.com

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