Our next two-day product school is Thursday August 9th, 2018 through Friday August 10th, 2018. The training will be at our headquarters in Rocklin, CA (near Sacramento).

EDD-3701x New EtherCAT Drive

      The EDD-3701x EtherCAT slave drive joins Galil’s EtherCAT Family. This family has grown to include two EtherCAT masters and an I/O slave with both digital and analog I/O points. The EDD-3701x is a motor amplifier that operates in an EtherCAT distributed system where there are up to 32 slave drives and one master. It has a daisy chain topology using standard CAT5 Ethernet cables. The EDD-3701x can interface with Galil masters (DMC-500x0 and DMC-52xx0) for sophisticated applications or with TwinCAT® for very simple applications. 

Figure 1: Communications Architecture

In keeping pace with advances in PC hardware and Operating Systems, Galil has released its latest generation of software tools for OEMs looking to develop fully featured, robust solutions to the most demanding motion control applications. This paper offers a brief overview a feature that may not be immediately familiar to long time Galil users, the gcaps server.

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      The goal of a mechanical system built for motion control is to accurately move or position a load.  In an ideal system, the load is rigidly coupled to, and directly driven by, a linear or rotary motor. There are many systems for which this drive method is not an option and a drivetrain is required to drive the load. Some common drivetrains include:

1. Ball or lead screws
2. Belt and pulley
3. Chain and sprocket
4. Gear trains or rack & pinion
5. Hydraulics