ANCA motion’s EtherCAT pendant offers flexible benefits to manufacturers

By OEM Update Editorial April 17, 2020 3:39 pm IST

In factories, as with the world outside them, devices and machines are becoming simpler to use.

A vital expectation nowadays is user-friendliness. The “user experience”-oriented smartphone era has seen industrial companies make their products and all their Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) much more intuitive. The world is moving towards an era where robots can be taught on the fly by an assembly line worker rather than requiring hours of painstaking programming by the expert. Machine builders are designing their solutions and their HMIs so that these can be set up with minimum steps, and put to work by someone with minimal training.

One reason to provide user-friendly machinery is the workforce demographic shift on the horizon. In the USA, for example, a quarter of manufacturing workers were 55 and older in 2017. A recent survey from the US’s National Association of Manufacturers found nearly a half of respondents were “very concerned” about the brain drain caused by the expertise ageing out of their companies.

With fewer expert machinists around, products need to be simple to use – as well as safe – in the hands of a non-expert as well as an expert operator.

ANCA Motion’s AMI 5000 remote pendant is a machine control interface with years of development and proven effectiveness behind it. It offers support for the EtherCAT fieldbus – almost unheard of among pendant manufacturers, and a massive benefit in quick integration with compatible systems. Interfacing with any host control system software that supports EtherCAT Fieldbus, the pendant is designed to connect and integrate with a machine in a few simple steps. EtherCAT also means a reduction in cable size and weight, thus improving manoeuvrability and portability.

Customers value the integration and easy to use capabilities of EtherCAT

“Really loving how nicely these pendants integrated into our Beckhoff EtherCAT master,” said Joe Sheehan, Sr. Automation and Controls Engineer, ACE – SpaceX.

“Was as close to plug and play as it gets. Bravo! I’ve received both that I have ordered so far, and we’re still exploring new application avenues for them.”

Another user, an Engineering Manager from Tru Tech Systems, offered that EtherCAT made interfacing a breeze, even across different brands, and vastly improved flexibility in hardware selection.

“The old idea of ‘using the same brand so there are no issues’ is gone with EtherCAT,” he said.