 Part marking NEE-Controls has added a part marking inkjet printer interface to its range of control systems supplied to Exact Technologies Part marking is defined as the principle of applying identification marking to components produced on cutting machines. A simple pen unit being used for plotting text traditionally achieves this process. Dependent on the substrate being marked, a variety of pen types would be used. Use of this method dictates that marking is limited to alphanumeric characters and does not encompass graphics. Such method is inherently slow, and with increasing productivity of cut components being required, part marking by pen can become the greater part of the production process. In addition to this many applications require bar code marking which can only be achieved using a different marking process. Exact Technology recognised productivity as being the major driver when deciding how to mark a substrate. Therefore working with NEE-Controls and a print head manufacturer a system has been designed and proven that is capable of marking substrates with text and graphics at up 1.7m/sec. Precise laser power control using PWM outputs NEE Controls Ltd has recently added a PWM output to its AMC-E servo range of motion control systems. Precise duty and frequency controls offer an ideal low cost solution to system integrators of laser machines. The PWM output is used to precisely control the modulation of the laser power to overcome problems of scorching caused by changes in machine speed. The frequency range is 150Hz to 10MHz and the duty cycle has a resolution of 65535:1. Both parameters can be set either from an HMI or host PC. Minimum and maximum duty cycles can be defined to ensure the laser continues to modulate when contouring at slow speeds. Inversely, the maximum duty cycle is used to limit laser power when cutting light materials. The PWM output compliments the solutions provided for laser system integrator when using one of the AMC range of motion control systems. Other solutions include controlling the modulation via an analogue output and generating a trigger at a precise machine position to fire the laser. 
USB2 Interface NEE Controls Ltd leads the way by adding a USB2 interface to the AMC range of motion control systems. The next generation of engine cards will have the option of being supplied with a USB2 interface to allow job data to be transferred in excess of 4000 times faster! Where complex 3 dimensional job data is being transferred to the control system 'on the fly', it is essential that job data is available to allow the AMC to efficiently blend many thousands of short moves together to achieve a constant surface speed through smooth high speed contouring. If the control system is executing data faster than it can be transferred from the CAD/CAM system then the overall contouring speed has to be reduced or worse still stop/start which increases tool wear and reduces part quality. Although our AMC range of motion controller can accept serial data at rates up to 115KB (approximately 11Kb/sec), which is already 3 times faster than the majority of our competition even this is not fast enough for some applications. Therefore our objectives are: -
USB2 meets all of our requirements and more offering data transfer rates of 480MHz. As the USB2 interface is being supplied on one card, the option can be retrofitted to all of the AMC range of motion control systems. Drop in engine replacement... The most efficient motion control system is about to be turbo charged. NEE Controls Ltd are currently designing a new engine card that will be plug compatible with our existing card. We are moving from 32 bit RISC architecture to 64 bit RISC which includes high performance DSP functionality and floating point co-processor which may come as a surprise to our competitors in view of how we compare. The benefits to our customers are immense as it will give our already high performance systems a typical 20 fold increase in computational performance. This means that irrespective of number of axes or geometry the limiting components preventing you from machining parts faster will be the drive chain. Unlike our competitors our specification, for example servo and trajectory updates does not incrementally reduce as you add more axes or the number of commands being processed per second reduces. By talking to our customers and distributors, as a team, we have identified a number of improvements that will delight our customers. Some of which are:-
Existing AMC users will be able to turbo charge their existing systems by simply upgrading to the new engine card. |