Control.com - Nerds in Control

Hello World,

We have been using CTC 2600 and 2700 controllers for a number of years. For the most part we have had good results. Support has been good, not great. Most applications use a moderate amount of digital I/O but a good amount of closed loop motion.

I did a project with a 5200 controller with four servos. Controller will sit on MONITOR SERVO STOPPED instructions. The loop is good and tight. Integral gain drives error close to zero. It will sit on that instruction. Now here is the good part. If I monitor the controller with a PC, it will run fine. I've had CTC tech support here, they can't figure it out. Any ideas?

Regards,
Mark Barrett

P.S. The motion cards had firmware bugs. They were upgraded. We had runaways wich were NOT feedback related. Lots of fun. Anybody do motion with the new 5300? What if any issues?

I have used 5300 with success in general purpose motion applications. I have about 15 axis out there running on 5300s in multiple systems. So far so good--just getting ready to do one with a more demanding cam profile that will change on the fly with PLS.

When compared to previous CTC software/hardware, highlights are floating point & advanced math, an exceptionally nice (and greatly expanded) toolset, removed limitations of 16 bit data table in favor of 2 dimensional arrays of whatever data type, and it's lightning fast. Software will be friendly to anyone used to object oriented languages (java, C#, VB.net) or text based motion controls (Baldor NextMove/MintDrive, Emerson FM3/4).

For motion, I've used it with KollMorgen, Emerson, Baldor, Telemecanique and just recently Copley Controls Amps. All ok except the Tele which had emulated encoder output and had difficulty tuning with consistent performance.

Note: all over the manual it says to run these with drives that allow you to parallel off of the motors encoder directly for feedback with out any emulation of the encoder signal- I guess I felt the need to prove it out...

I've had a few hurdles, but its well conceived & so far performed very solid. Good Luck!

Lee Clore
Onyx Industries