Timers and Counters
After spending a month in Central America I am glad to be back, energized and ready to start my new automation ventures. I will be working on the completion and publishing of the Primer as well as building my new …
Category: Hardware
Mechanical and electrical hardware
Variable Frequency Drives (VFDs)
From the Primer: A variable-frequency drive (VFD) is a device for controlling the rotational speed of an alternating current (AC) electric motor by controlling the frequency of the electrical power supplied to the motor. Variable frequency drive controllers are solid …
HMI and Touchscreen Technology
During the process of specifying HMI hardware for my current project some fairly deep discussions were had concerning touchscreen technology. One part of the specification stated “No SAW or APR touchscreens”. Why would you want to avoid these in an …
Tray Handling
A few weeks ago I covered robots and robotics a bit and it was recently brought to my attention that I hadn’t covered much in the general motion control field. Maybe that’s because most of the applications I have worked …
Robots
When I was growing up one of my favorite shows on TV was the Jetsons. There were cool looking houses, flying cars that folded up into a suitcase and best of all, robots! Then Star Wars came out in the …
Indexers and Synchronous Machines
From The Primer: 4.2 Indexers and Synchronous Machines 4.2.1 Rotary Cam Indexers Rotary indexers are used to move actuators to fixed points in a circular path. They are built to move to discrete points and are typically available in 2-12 …
Misumi
Despite being an Electrical and Controls engineer I often have to do mechanical design, albeit on a basic level. Whenever I need to fixture something, for instance on a vision application or other inspection, one of the first manufacturers I …
Photoeyes
Some basic info on photoeyes from the Primer: Photoelectric sensors or Photoeyes transmit and receive a light signal. The sensor changes state when the light changes from being received to not being received or vice-versa. There are two conditions for …
LVDTs
One of the first applications I wrote about on this blog back in January 2011 was a Rocker Arm Cover gauge that used a number of LVDTs to calculate a plane and its intercept points. In that blog I concentrated …
ID Systems
Early in my career I became in involved in material handling systems more often than any other kind of project. For one thing, they were generally pretty simple from a controls perspective, just turning conveyor motors on and off, moving …