A customer was in need of rebuilding motor winding equipment. Their desire was to retrofit an older machine with a new control system which would provide the user easy set-up and flexibility to run a wide variety of parts. Three axes perform the principle winding, while up to five additional axes perform set-up operations. The principle axis was a 48” travel linear motor which cams with a rotary motor during the winding operations.
Some of the machines require five axes of motion and others have seven. The customer needed a controller that could handle both applications and wanted to eliminate the need for a PLC if possible. This particular machine also required an operator display which would allow the operator to enter new recipes. In addition, the camming operation added an extra degree of complexity to the motion.
A Parker ACR9000 acted as the motion and the machine controller. This unit is capable of handling up to eight axes which made handling the customer’s axes needs simple. The necessary maching I/O was handled via remote CAN-bus I/O. A CTC InteractX display handled the operator input and also stored the recipes which were downloaded at the start of each part.
ACR9000: A powerful motion controller which requires a great deal of experience to utilize to its fullest. Very few programmers understand its camming capabilities.
CTC EPX display: Global takes great pride in its ability to build functional and aesthetically pleasing screens. This particular application contained screens that allowed the user to quickly cut, copy, and edit recipes so that the user can enter a great deal of data very quickly.
VB: VisualBasic is commonly used at Global Controls. It becomes especially handy to perform little odds and ends that the HMI cannot perform out of the box. In the case here, it was vital to be able to calculate the motion data needed for the cam positions.
Global had the know-how to write both the motion code and machine control program within the ACR. More importantly, the HMI programming required was very involved as each recipe contained approximately 100 data items. With so much data, it was critical that the data entry was made as easy as possible to increase throughput. Once the data was entered, a VB application ran in the background to calculate the number of the positional parameters before downloading them to the ACR9000.