September 8, 2014 – Control Technology expands Model 5300 EtherCAT Master to accommodate more EtherCAT devices. This includes the following servo drives/actuators:
- ABB MicroFlex e150
- AMC DigiFlex Performance
- Copley Accelnet
- Emerson Unidrive SP/Digitax ST Servo Drive
- IAI America Intelligent Actuators
- Kollmorgen AKD
- Sanyo Denki SANMOTION R Servo Drive, and
- Yaskawa Sigma-5.
Devices are tested and certified in-house. Customers can choose any or several supported devices and expect them to be automatically recognized and configured by the controller upon start-up. In addition, the model 5300 is pre-engineered to support I/O supplied by Beckhoff, Turck, and WAGO, as well as SMC valve stacks EtherCAT is supported in the CTC model 5300 series of control systems in the form of an EtherCAT Master module (model M3-41A), offering high-performance control of networked servos, stepping motors and I/O devices. The EtherCAT-based drives and I/O points appear in the programming environment along with any other drives and I/O on the system, and are programmed as though they were local devices.
This means users can freely and transparently intermix local and remote servos and I/O, or change a device from local to remote without extensive programming changes.