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Motion Control Fundamentals

Considering your deployment hardware design goals early in the design process can help you get to market faster. You can eliminate rework and deploy more reliable embedded systems. You can also be machining more quickly by using much of the software and hardware of your prototype within your deployed product.

The most common motors in the industrial and embedded space are stepper, brushed, and brushless DC motors, but there are other motor options. Each motor requires individual input signals to spin the motor and transform electrical energy into mechanical energy. In the broadest sense, motion control helps you use the motor that best meets your application requirements without dealing with all the low-level signaling needed to spin a motor.

In addition, motion control provides high-level functions so you can efficiently implement custom applications based on building blocks to create solutions for common tasks like precise positioning, synchronization of multiple axes, and movement with defined velocity, acceleration, and deceleration.

Because most of the motors are operated during transient circumstances, motion control tools need to adapt to different loads and dynamic conditions, which requires complex control algorithm processing and feedback information from the mechanical system. Last but not least, motion tasks are usually mission-critical and often operate machines that could harm humans around them. Therefore, security features such as limit switches and I/O channels are required to collect status information and execute shutdown routines.

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