Trio Motion (www.triomotion.com) has introduced two new motion and machine controllers that economically and flexibly provide new levels of multi-tasking stepper or servo control for high performance automation.

Based on the 533 MHz ARM11 processor, the MC403 and MC405 controllers offers a vast array of performance enhancements enabled by the ARM11 core. With an optimized selectable servo update rate from 125 microseconds to 2000 microseconds, up to 512K data table size and over four times the clock frequency at 533 MHz, the double floating point precision processor offers an outstanding servo loop accuracy with fast 64 bit integer position and 64 bit real-number mathematics registers.

The MC403 can control three stepper axes or two servo axes plus a master encoder input, while the MC405 can control five step and direction axes or four servos with a master encoder. Offering a maximum stepper output frequency of two MHz, the controllers’ servo encoder ports are selectable for rotary feedback or incremental linear. The ports can also be configured for Tamagawa, SSI and EnDat absolute types.

Aside from the encoder provision and the axis count, the evident differences between the two models relate to the number of virtual exes offered, the multitasking ability and the physical variations such as the status display, I/O count and size. The MC403 features eight axes in software and can simultaneously operate six tasks, while the four-servo/five-stepper MC405 has sixteen axes in software and can run ten simultaneous tasks.

Although both controllers provide two 12-bit analog inputs and eight 24 VDC inputs, the physical layer of MC405 has ten registration inputs compared to MC403’s six. MC405 also offers eight 24V bidirectional I/O channels rather than four.