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Motion Control
Round-Up
News and Views from the World
of Automation.
August, 2008
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| Dear Reader, |
It's the end of August and time for the end-of-summer wrap up. Hopefully you all have had a safe and happy vacation somewhere along the line. Local schools should be starting up and we can all start looking forward to autumn and holidays over the coming months.
As you look ahead, keep us in mind for your motion control projects. We have applications specialists available to help you with deciphering model numbers, providing crossover services and troubleshooting installation and operation problems. AT BEI, your satisfaction is important to us. Enjoy this month's newsletter and if there is anything we can do for you - drop us a line.
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| Buy it Now! |
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 Many of you have been looking for the convenience of on-line shopping for BEI industrial products. For years, we've offered on-line purchasing for our encoders and for a few select accessories.
But now we have launched our own, expanded, eStore for convenient shopping on a variety of industrial products including common encoder accessories, connectors, couplings, electronic interfaces and cabling.
Most of the items in our eStore are available for shipment within a week. What's more - most of them also come with free shipment (via 2nd day service to addresses in the continental US.)
Click on the shopping cart above and you'll get a chance to browse through our new, on-line store. We encourage you to look through our offerings and if you don't see what you're looking for - then send us a note. We want to update our products on a regular basis with products that you want and need. Happy (and convenient) shopping to you! |
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"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance. "
Last month we featured a famous engineer who was born in the month of July. Keeping with this same idea - August's birthday feature is a famous aviation pioneer whose quote, above reflects his can-do attitude. This particular individual was part of a two-person development team that spent years in researching and testing different ideas for heavier-than-air flying craft. This worked culminated in him piloting a 12 horsepower aircraft 120 feet for a total flying time of 12 seconds. 
By this time, you've probably guessed that we're talking about the Wright Brothers and in particular, Orville Wright. Of the two brothers (Wilbur and Orville) Orville was the more outgoing and the better bicyclist. But it was Wilbur, the dedicated researcher that led the effort. Wilbur died nine years after their famous flight and Orville carried the Wright Brothers legacy through until 1948 when he died at the age of 76, as elder statesman for aviation and member of various official boards and committees, including the fledgling National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (which later became NASA). To read a more extensive biography of the Wright brothers, just click Orville's picture at right. |
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Can You Solve This? |
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 Here's a bit of a tricky one where our customer was using an encoder in a pick and place type of dispensing operation. He needed precision placement of the dispensing tip and so specified a fairly high resolution encoder at 10,000 cycles per turn. After receiving and bench testing the encoder in his prototype all seemed to be working fine. He finished up his programming for the full sized model, began running the operation and then problems started to show up. Most of the time the encoder worked flawlessly as his dispensing mechanism was working within a small area. But when he commanded a long movement of the dispensing arm, the controller lost track of encoder position resulting in crashes of the arm. What could be going wrong?
Answer: The high resolution requirement was a clue to this problem. A calculation of the data rate revealed the issue. When the dispensing arm was operating locally its movements were fairly small resulting in angular speeds of about 63 radians/sec (roughly 600 rpm) for a data rate of 100 kHz - within the limits of the encoder and controller. For longer movements of the arm the maximum commanded speeds were about twice that exceeding the bandwidth of the encoder and controller resulting in an uncontrolled condition. We recommended that he either use a lower resolution encoder, 2500 cycles per turn and use edge detection to create the 10,000 counts that he wanted, or to specify a dual resolution encoder if he wanted to operate with dual controllers.
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It Had to Happen
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 Given the growth in PowerPoint presentations, sooner or later someone had to start showing the lighter side to all of those serious graphs, charts and tables. Enter the world of GraphJam. A (mostly) silly site dedicated to the irreverent use of power point tools to illustrate popular cultural phenomena. Just witness the typical graph of the information age as presented above. After all who could argue that we are bombarded with buckets of useless information and that it's gotten worse over the years.
Take a look at this next one. Haven't we all experienced the phenomenon presented
here? You just know that the other lane of cars in traffic is always faster than yours. 
If you want to experience the full potential of graphs and charts that you never even thought about - but wish you had - then click on either of the graphs presented here and you will be transported to another world. A world where the sometimes confusing and complicated experiences that we have every day suddenly make sense . . . but in a whole new way. Have fun, and the next time you do a PowerPoint I guarantee you'll look at it a little differently. | |
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| I hope you found this month's newsletter interesting and useful. Come visit us on the web, call us or email us anytime. We'll do our best to help you out with products and services for your automation project. See you next month. |
Thanks for reading,
Scott
Orlosky
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email: Scott
Orlosky
voice: 805-968-0782
web: http://www.beiied.com
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