This just in: Acontis, a leading provider of EtherCAT software and realtime hypervisor technology, has announced that its new EC-Motion product is now available for the QNX Neutrino operating system.So what, exactly, is EC-Motion? In a nutshell, it's a C/C++ motion control library for EtherCAT drives (i.e. the electronic systems that control industrial motors).
According to Acontis, the EC-Motion library supports all of the single-axis movement commands specified in the PLCopen standard, eliminating the need for additional (and costly) hardware. It also allows the developer to:
- implement applications for multi-axis coordinated movements
- operate EtherCAT drives in cyclic synchronous position mode (CSP) or cyclic synchronous velocity (CSV) mode
- easily integrate the EC-Motion library into custom motion applications as well as into a programmable logic controller (PLC) runtime environment
Here's the EC-Motion architecture at a glance:
Demo on BeagleBone computer
Acontis also announced that it will demonstrate EC-Motion for QNX at the embedded world conference, from February 26 to 28 in Nuremberg. The demo will run on a BeagleBone, a credit-card-sized computer based on Sitara ARM AM335x Cortex-A8 processors from Texas Instruments. The demo will show a Yaskawa Sigma-5 EtherCAT drive running in cyclic synchronous velocity mode.
If you plan to attend embedded world, you can catch the demo at the IXXAT Automation GmbH stand, Hall 1/1-538.
For more details, read the Acontis press release.
