Dante Technical Solutions were contracted as consultants for the Bosch Rexroth ctrlX platform that had been selected by the client due to its high accuracy and performance. The project required a single axis servo motor that would be coupled to the aircraft engine so various tests could be performed over a 10 minute cycle time. The system required the ctrlX drive to control the servo motor in constant speed mode. The system required an HMI for local manual control. The client also requested the facility to have remote control via LabVIEW and the ability to output data to LabVIEW. To fulfil these requirements, a drive with an integrated core was selected with the following apps: Motion Standard, PLC Basic, PLC Standard, CODESYS – WebVisu, Motion Standard and ctrlX OS – EtherCAT Master.
Dante Technical Solutions wrote a PLC program that ran inside of the drive core. The program acted as a gateway between the drive and the outside world. The WebVisu app was employed to spool HMI web pages to a Beijer X2 Pro HMI thus allowing for manual control and system diagnostics.
By accessing the data layer of the core LabVIEW was able to access the PLC program to run specific tests and acquire required data.
The Bosch Rexroth drive and Beijer HMI was packaged into a control panel along with the required safety protection to create a finished solution.
