The SERCOS Vendor organizations have announced the development of a Pack Profile in response to a request by the OMAC Packaging Machinery Working Group. The Pack Profile defines a subset of the SERCOS interface functions for packaging machinery to further improve the multi-vendor interoperability of servo controls and drives. Products from various vendors that conform to the Pack Profile will provide plug-and-play functionality for Packaging Machinery. A conformance test to ensure interoperability is now available.A number of major servo control and drive vendors have announced their support for this initiative.
A Pack Profile interoperability demo, with controls and drives from multiple vendors, will be presented at Pack Expo 2004, Nov. 7-11, in Chicago.Existing SERCOS function groups and the corresponding parameters have been mapped into profiles for three of the six OMAC-defined application classes. The profiles consist of mandatory and optional parameters for simple servo drives and frequency converters, and also for intelligent drives, which can be commanded by any of position, velocity or torque values.
The published Pack Profile specification, plus a white paper on the subject, are available on the SERCOS website, www.sercos.com .