Ten Tips to Make Motion Control Easier

Create and maintain a library of reusable function blocks that perform tasks specific to your machines, product, or industry such as flying shear, cut-to-length, winding, etc. ORMEC supplies application specific function blocks and sample code that can be easily modified.

4) Error handling

Build error handling into your application from the beginning. Fault recovery is critical to most applications and can be relatively painless if designed in up front.

5) Feedback devices

Select the proper feedback devices. Consider speed requirements, ambient temperature, machine vibration and resolution. If it is an electronic gearing application, consider the relative resolutions between the master and slave axes to reduce the amount of gearing up. Encoder vs. resolver  design considerations should be examined.

6) Integrated drives, motors and cables

Purchase integrated drives, motors, and cables to help reduce design and commissioning time.

7) Commissioning software

Make sure that your motion control commissioning software has powerful, intuitive tools to simplify tuning. A built-in digital scope with frequency analysis makes configuring a notch filter trivial.

8) Motor and drive sizing

Size your motors and drives properly for the application. We can assist you with this process – or provide you with software tools that make it easy for you to do this.

9) Motion controller features

Choose a motion controller with a rich feature set of application specific function blocks or built-in capabilities such as high-speed registration, tension control, etc. Match your application requirements to the feature set of the motion controller.

10) Choose the right supplier

Select a motion control supplier that not only knows their products, but is also experienced with how to best use them on your application.