Sparkplug B Properly: Birth and Death Certificates, Metrics and Rebirth The first message the carton transfer gateway sends is 592 bytes on the topic spBv1.0/Plant2_CartonLine/NBIRTH/GW-TR14, it carries all 19 metrics the node will ever publish, and it goes out at QoS 0 with the retain flag clear. Everything about that sentence looks wrong to somebody … Read more
Reading a Kinetix 5700 Fault at the Drive: the Display, the Fault Log and the Four Places to Look The LCD on a 2198-D032-ERS3 reads FLT S45 – FDBK COMM FL, the MOD indicator above it is flashing red, and the line has been down for eleven minutes. Before anyone fetches a laptop, the drive … Read more
Registration and the MAR Instruction: Catching a Mark at Speed on a Kinetix 5700 A Kinetix 5700 inverter latches a registration event with ±3 µs accuracy and 700 ns repeatability, and its propagation delay is compensated to zero. At 1.5 m/s that accuracy figure is 4.5 µm of position uncertainty. The photoeye in front of … Read more
Soft Travel Limits, Hard Limits and the Overtravel That Faults a Kinetix Axis A registration input on a Kinetix 5700 inverter gets a 12.0 µs pulse reject filter. The overtravel input, on the same IOD connector and the same silicon, gets the 20 ms nominal debounce that every other input function gets. At 500 mm/s … Read more
An MQTT Broker for Plant Data: Topics, QoS, Retained Messages and Last Will The topic string plant2/pack/carton1/tr14/belt1/amps is 42 bytes. The float it carries is four. Every publish of the motor current on one belt of the carton transfer therefore spends ten times as much on saying where the number came from as on the … Read more
Scaling a Kinetix Axis in Real Units: Position Units, the Conversion Constant and the Gearbox A new Kinetix axis is scaled one Position Unit per motor rev, at 1,000,000 Motion Counts per rev, and on Unlimited travel that axis rolls its position accumulator over after 2,147 revolutions. The motion runs through the rollover perfectly smoothly. … Read more
Tuning a Kinetix 5700 Axis: Load Ratio, Bandwidth and the Autotune That Lies Loop Response on the General page of a Kinetix axis is a three-item dropdown, and on a drive with the default 1.5 ms model time constant it moves the position loop between 8.2 Hz and 101.7 Hz. That is a factor of … Read more
Driving a Motor from a ControlLogix: From a Rung to a Turning Shaft on a Kinetix 5700 A 2198-D032-ERS3 inverter, a VPL-B1303C motor on one Hiperface DSL cable, and a 1756-L83E that has never carried a motion group. Two rungs will turn that shaft — an MSO and then an MAM — and neither is … Read more
MCD and MCCP: Changing the Speed of a Move in Flight, and What MCCP Actually Calculates An MCD that lowers Decel from 1000 mm/s² to 200 mm/s² 1.72 seconds into an absolute move catches the axis at 391.6 mm with 131 mm/s still to lose. Stopping at the new rate takes 42.8 mm and only … Read more
Arrays, UDTs and Structures Over OPC UA: What the Client Actually Sees Insert one DINT called Jam_Count into the TR14_Belt user-defined type, put it after the State member where it belongs logically, and download to the 1756-L83E. Fault_Code moves from byte 4 to byte 8, and Starts, Run_Seconds, Speed_mps, Motor_Amps and Last_Fault_S each move four … Read more
MAG and Gearing Two Axes: The Ratio, the Slave, and What Happens on a Fault A MAG with a Ratio of 0.5 and Clutch enabled, fired at a slave whose master is already running at 600 mm/s, ramps the slave to 300 mm/s in 0.30 seconds at 1000 mm/s² and leaves it permanently 44.9 mm … Read more
MAH and Homing a Kinetix Axis: The Switch, the Marker, and the Home That Lands in the Wrong Place A home-to-switch-then-marker sequence at a Home Speed of 25 mm/s and a Home Return Speed of 5 mm/s takes just over four seconds on a 2198-D032-ERS4 axis, and 1.5 of those seconds are spent crawling back … Read more