Haydon Kerk Motion Solutions, Inc. (www.HaydonKerk.com) has unveiled the new Haydon RoHS compliant PCM4806 IDEA™ programmable linear actuator drive – the latest addition to the IDEA Drive family of products. The new drive is optimized to regulate low-current power stage suited for controlling smaller Haydon’s can-stack linear actuators. With the PCM4806’s addition to the IDEA line, there is a programmable drive available for use with almost the entire line of Haydon’s stepper motor linear actuators.

The IDEA Drive is an easy-to-use electronic drive and a fully programmable control unit that comes with a patent pending graphic user interface. On-screen buttons are used to program the compact drive, instead of proprietary programming languages or complicated command sets.

The graphic user interface features automatic population of the drive and motor parameters based on the entered Haydon actuator part number after being prompted by the user interface. In-depth stepper motor knowledge or complex parameter calculations from the user is unnecessary. For experienced user, default values can be easily adjusted provided that they remain in the safe range computed by the software, which allows the system designer to troubleshoot programs using multiple line or line-by-line program execution with the interactive debug feature. Outputs and inputs can be simulated in software prior to connecting actual I/O hardware.

PCM4806 IDEA programmable linear actuator drive also features a single supply voltage of 12 VDC to 48 VDC, programmable current control, eight opto-isolated general purpose I/O, and 0.6Arms (0.84Apeak) max rated current per phase. The outputs are open collector, 5 VDC to 24 VDC, 200 mA maximum per output. Communications to the IDEA Drive is achieved through a USB to mini USB.