Low-cost servo motion control

April 2003 Motion Control & Drives Products & Solutions Smart Home Automation

Motion control developers now have a low-cost option for servo motor control with the National Instruments PCI-7342 motion control board. This new board features dual-axis control, easy integration with data acquisition (DAQ) and vision systems, and the programming benefits of the award-winning LabVIEW graphical development environment.

With the NI PCI-7342 board, developers can configure two axes for stepper or servo motors while taking advantage of linear interpolation for multi-axis movement, 32 bits of digital I/O for high-speed capture, and a RTSI bus for powerful realtime synchronisation. This low-cost, high-performance board is suitable for dual-axis, automated test applications in a range of industries, including automated bacteria colony analysis in biotechnology and electric drill life-cycle testing in electronics test.

This device is also compatible with the new NI Motion Assistant configurable software. Motion control developers can more quickly program and prototype motion systems and generate LabVIEW code for reduced development time with the NI Motion Assistant easy-to-use point-and-click interface. With LabVIEW and NI Motion Assistant, the PCI-7342 motion control board seamlessly integrates motion control into automated test and machine control applications.

About National Instruments

For more than 26 years, National Instruments has developed virtual instrumentation solutions built on rapidly advancing commercial technologies, including industry-standard computers and the Internet. NI increases productivity for customers worldwide by delivering easy-to-integrate software, such as the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, and modular hardware, such as PXI modules for data acquisition and instrumentation. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3000 employees and direct operations in 37 countries. In 2001, the company sold products to more than 24 000 different companies in more than 60 countries around the world.

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