Magellan Motion Processors deliver a programmable mechanism to monitor performance
Lincoln, MA - Performance Motion Devices, Inc. announces the Magellan™ family of motion control ICs, with automatic machine monitoring capability for recording and reacting to performance and safety-related conditions. These flexible, programmable motion chips offer users the ability to define and initiate motion-related actions such as smooth stop, abrupt stop, or system disable upon occurrence of user-defined conditions. In addition, a hardware trace buffer can be used to collect long-term performance data. Magellan ICs are available for DC brush, brushless DC, microstepping, and step motors.
Magellan’s automatic machine monitoring system handles conditions such as motion error, positive and negative limit switches, position breakpoints, commutation monitoring, and others. Once the event settings are programmed, Magellan continuously monitors the specified condition and executes the programmed action if and when it occurs. Additionally, Magellan provides default values for event related processing to ensure operation for typical motion systems.Magellan Motion Control ICs provide a hardware trace buffer which can simultaneously store four performance-related values chosen from more than twenty-eight recordable variables. Selectable variables include position servo lag, motor output, servo integral, commutation angle, and many others.
Once selected for automatic storage, the data collected by the Magellan Motion Processor can be analyzed to determine whether machine wear or vibration is increasing, or whether other user-defined safety or performance-related conditions have occurred.Chuck Lewin, CEO comments, “The driving factor in motion systems today is machine safety, and the related issue of improving up-time. It isn't enough to run a profile, or close a servo loop.
What is really important is having the motion control hardware collect and analyze machine-related performance issues in real time.”Communication to and from Magellan ICs occurs via a host microprocessor using an 8-or 16-bit parallel bus, CANBus 2.0B, or an asynchronous serial port. Other features include programmable PID filter with velocity and acceleration feedforward, 32-bit position error, dual biquad filters, 50 µSec loop time, and multi-chip synchronization.
