A Conversation With Ormec About Motion Control in Industrial Settings
When a long-time company in the motion control industry makes a deliberate decision to turn away from its proprietary systems and move to open standards, there has to be a good reason behind the decision. For ORMEC Systems Corp. (www.ormec.com), the impetus came when they realized that the market area they had been serving for 25 years was too upper-end and limited for the mass market.
“We do motion control and drives – that’s what we build,” says Dennis L. Morrow, vice president of marketing and sales at ORMEC. While they also have motors, gearboxes, I/O and peripherals, their core business is the motion controller.
For over two decades, the company prospered by catering to industrial applications requiring the most difficult and specialized motion controllers. They list blue-ribbon firms like Johnson & Johnson, Owens-Illinois, B&H Labeling, and C.G. Breitling on their client roster.
“We were a supplier of big, complex machines,” Morrow says. “But the bad news is that it is a limited market.”
The company was started by four engineers who worked for Kodak 25 years ago. They were controls engineers and they branched out into a consulting business for controllers. In the late 1980s, they got into hardware and developed their first controller.
Morrow notes that many companies are trying to climb up the pyramid from low-level motion applications to more sophisticated ones. But ORMEC’s challenge is to move itself from proprietary, high-axis, high-count applications down to the world of single-, two- or three-axis operations.
“We were the first company in the world to use DSP in motion control,” he says. “A lot of people beat a path to our door. We got off to a fast start.” Their Gen-3 appliance had 32 axis platforms.
Eventually, they realized that they would have to serve a broader market if they were to grow and expand. They moved into the world of real motion with their SMLC (Soft Motion Logic Controller) platform offering.
Today, the company is committed to open standards at every level practical: they use Sony’s and Apple’s Firewire, CoDySys out of
Morrow says CoDySys is quite easy to utilize. While many manufacturers have their PLC and motion card separate, ORMEC has all of its controls in one place.
“We do the motion, I/O and PLC in one program,” Morrow says. “We get the high speed we need with 32-bit line-on-line gearing between the axes,” he adds. The PLC runs at a regular loop rate.
Anyone who has spent time in the nuclear industry will recognize the ONX standard as the one used at nuclear stations and similar high-demand applications. It is prized for its stability and resistance to crashing.
Not all of their software judgments are that undisputed. Their decision to go with Firewire might raise some eyebrows. Morrow says they are quite pleased with Firewire, despite the bad rap that it had earlier from industrial users.
Morrow admits it had a bad reputation when it first came out, mainly due to the analog components that picked up noise in an industrial setting.
“Version b – IEEE 1394-b – is much more stable, much better than the old 1394,” Morrow says. They use the IEEE 1394-b version in their drives and controllers.
“It gives us the highest data transfer rate in the industry,” Morrow says. Right now, they attain 400 MB/s throughput. Morrow says that, by next year, he expects to see speeds of 800 MB/s and shortly thereafter, fiber speeds.
Why not fiber today? “Right now, it’s too expensive. But eventually we’ll be there,” he concludes.
