December 18, 2013– Soft Servo Systems announces WMX general motion controller with up to 64 axes of high-end motion control functions on the EtherCAT platform. The WMX comes with Windows Class Library that supports up to 256 threads and includes over 200 API functions including EtherCAT network management. The Class Library allows the users to develop a highly original, customized motion control solution on Windows for their own motion control application. This software can control up to 64 axes with advanced control functions and up to 64 multi-channels. Motion functions include Jog, PTP, various types of interpolations, listed motion, event-interrupt control, and buffered API execution, just to name a few.
Override functions are able to change target position, velocity and even profile parameters dynamically during the motion. Motion profiles include jerk-free and jerk-limited profiles. The WMX is equipped with its original EtherCAT master stack. Major EtherCAT functions include CoE, FoE, DC Sync, Line/Star/Ring Topologies, Hot Connect, and Network Management API to monitor and control slaves.
Developers can embed their motion control with Visual Studio 2005 or later (C/C++) and Microsoft.NET framework 2.0 or later. The WMX is ideal for motion control applications in the semiconductor equipment, flat panel equipment, chip mounter, LED bonder, packaging, materials handling, pick and place, converting, food processing, laser cutting/engraving, plasma cutting, and wood-working. As it can run as an EtherCAT master on a PC with a LAN (Ethernet) port, no specialized interface board is needed.
This makes it a cost-efficient and economical solution, and makes motion control truly PC-based, compatible with windows XP and Windows 7 platform. WMX includes the original EtherCAT Master stack and a license of RTX, a Windows' real-time extension tool, supporting realtime motion control with synchronous communication cycle as fast as 0.5ms without any additional hardware.