Servo Drive/Controller

Parker’s Electromechanical Automation Division announces the release of the Intelligent Parker Amplifier (IPA). The IPA is a 1.5-axis servo drive/controller based on the ACR control platform. Available in two power levels—400W and 1500W—the IPA can drive a wide range of rotary and linear motors and supports a number of industry standard feedback protocols. The IPA provides a dual port Ethernet interface, which gives the user a variety of different machine control options.

The robust Ethernet implementation in the IPA provides outstanding performance in HMI-, PC- and PLC-based applications. The IPA supports EtherNet/IP as an adapter device, making it an excellent option as a servo drive in an Allen Bradley CompactLogix- or ControlLogix-based system and has been EtherNet/IP CONFORMANCE TESTED by the ODVA. Parker has developed a library of Add-On Instructions (AOI) for use in the Logix environment, giving the programmer an easy yet powerful set of tools to incorporate high-performance servo control in familiar software environment.

Using standard TCP/IP communications, the IPA is configured and programmed within the ACR-View software environment using the well-known and highly flexible AcroBASIC programming language. A 650Mhz TI DSP gives the IPA significant processing power, capable of serving up to five independent Ethernet connections and managing the multi-tasking ACR operating system at speeds that rival the highest performance controllers in the industry. Motion and machine control features of the IPA include:

• Multitasking of up to 16 different tasks
• Incremental, absolute and continuous moves
• Trapezoidal and S-curves profiles
• High-speed (1 ms) position captures
• Registration moves
• Electronic gearing and camming

Combined with Parker’s Interact Xpress HMI platform, the IPA becomes an affordable machine control solution.  Xpress supports connections to multiple IPAs and other PLCs at the same time, with an easy-to-use development environment and award-winning graphics.