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Tiny 700W drive launches ‘a new era for servodrives’

17 May, 2017

A Finnish drive manufacturer called Granite Devices claims to have set a new benchmark for servodrive compactness with a snap-on board-format 700W drive that measures just 70 x 37 x 7mm, yet has built-in motion control and SIL2 safety functions. Granite describes the Ioni drive as “the Swiss Army knife for motion control”, adding that it represents “a new era for servodrives” that will bring time and cost savings to machine automation.

The drives can provide torque, velocity and position control for AC, brushless DC, brushed DC and linear servomotors, as well as stepper motors from 2–700W. High dynamic range torque control allows the drives to support the wide range of motor types.

The drives can perform multi-axis synchronous motion control with non-real-time hosts, such as Windows PC, via USB or Ethernet connections. This is achieved using hardware-side trajectory buffering and distributed clock synchronisation. The user’s motion control software fills the drive’s trajectory buffers, resulting in smooth multi-axis motion.

There are three versions of the drive: the €149 Ioni Standard; the €179 Ioni Pro, which supports incremental and sin/cos encoders; and a high-current variant called the Ioni Pro HC, which costs €199.

Granite Devices also offers motherboards that the drives can be plugged into to create motion systems that can control up to four axes. More axes can be controlled by daisy-chaining the Ionicube motherboards, which cost €74.50–149 each. Granite will also provide open-source schematics to users who want to design their own custom motherboards.

Up to four of Granite Devices' servodrive boards can be plugged into a motherboard to provide multi-axis control

The drives connect directly to the open C/C++/C# programmable SimpleMotion bus, as well as to digital pulse train and analogue controllers.

The drives can be ordered for worldwide delivery from Granite Devices’ online shop




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