Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have To... Rotate

When you think of motors, do you think of a spinning shaft for running things like the fan in an air conditioner or an exhaust fan?  What happens if something needs to move in a linear fashion?  

Motors are more than rotation.  This episode is about motion control, rotary and linear motion.

You'll learn about the types of rotary motors:  stepper motors and servo motors.  You'll learn how stepper and servo motors are constructed, the applications suitable for each, and the advantages, as well as the limitations of stepper and servo motors.

Keep with us as we explore the world of linear motion.  

You'll hear about linear servo motors.  The construction, applications, advantages, and the complexities of linear servo motors. 

Stick around to discover the world of linear actuators and the types of linear actuators:  belt-driven and ball screw actuators.  You'll learn that there are two types of ball screw actuators:  rod and rodless.  There are advantages and limitations to each that you will become aware of.  

By the end of this episode, you will know the benefits, applications, and trade-offs with these motors and solutions available.

Here are some resources.  

• Learn more about LinMot's linear motors.
• Discover the world of belt-driven actuators:  Nidec, Tolomatic, and Yaskawa.
• Read up on ball screw actuators:  Tolomatic and Yaskawa.

For more information on sizing or elliTek's pre-engineered solutions, reach out to one of elliTek's engineers, (865) 409-1555.

In case you missed it, elliTek is the official distributor for Hanwha Robotics in the United States.  To schedule a free demo, please email freedemo@ellitek.com or follow this link to elliTek's contact page.

Reach out to us with any questions or future topics!

• LinkedIn:  www.linkedin.com/company/ellitek-inc
• Instagram:  www.instagram.com/ellitek
• Facebook:  www.facebook.com/ellitek
• Twitter:  www.twitter.com/elliTek_Inc/media

If you don't want to click on those links, pick up the phone to call us at (865) 409-1555 ext. 804.

Transcript

Brandon Ellis  0:00  

Hello everyone, this is Brandon Ellis with "Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have To" and I'm your host. Today we're going to be talking about motion control, rotary and linear motion. So, join us. 

Brandon Ellis  0:43  

Hey, everybody, this is Brandon again. So, I'm here with Beth Elliott, our marketing manager. Hey, Beth.

Beth Elliott  0:48  

Hey, Brandon, how's it going today?

Brandon Ellis  0:50  

Going great. And so, we're talking about some more advanced topics today.

Beth Elliott  0:56  

True that. Yeah, I'm gonna be a little bit lost today. So, bear with me.

Brandon Ellis  1:01  

Hey, it's just rotary and linear. What's the big deal?

Beth Elliott  1:04  

Yeah, right. Before we get into the topic, do we have a new partner?

Brandon Ellis  1:09  

We have a brand-new partner. And I'm so excited about it. If you've been, if you follow us on LinkedIn, or Facebook, or Instagram, Twitter, you probably know this already, so this is old news for you guys. But Hanwha Robotics and Hanwha is, Hanwha is known for many, many years, they've done in the injection mold, injection mold, and plastic injection type robots with Cartesian type robots, but they have a collaborative robot that we absolutely have loved from the time we met it. It's been about a year and a half ago. And we have been working with them through the pandemic and all those confines. And finally, everything's done, every T’s crossed, every I's dotted and we are the official distributor here in the US for Hanwha Robotics. So, we're extremely excited about that. So, if you have a collaborative robot plan or action or curiosity, we want to invite you to get in touch with us, you can email us for a free demo and arrange that at freedemo@elliTek.com is the dedicated email address for that. So let us know who you are. Speak out to us. And we'll be happy to talk with you some. But it's an exciting product.

Beth Elliott  2:18  

Yeah, it's really cool robot. I was actually able to give it a little jog this morning.

Brandon Ellis  2:23  

Hey, after all collaborative robots are a marketing person's 

Beth Elliott  2:29  

Dream. 

Brandon Ellis  2:30  

Past time. So actually, that speaks to the, what we love about it. We, we talk about how our mission statement as a company is to empower our customers. And we do that by finding product, products that we feel like simplify and are not as difficult as as many other platforms may be. And so, we feel like the Hanwha absolutely speaks to that. And, and so it's just like today's topic, which is an advanced topic, and you and I always try to take advanced topics and kind of explain them in a simpler way. And we're going to try and do that today. 

Beth Elliott  3:10  

You're very good at that. 

Brandon Ellis  3:12  

We just, our last podcast we talked about, we, it was kind of a, we came off our discussions about RPAs. And in the RPA discussion, kind of the last half of that, we talked about collaboratives, because of the path teach. It reminded me of what an RPA does, except RPAs have nothing (Robotic Process Automation) has nothing to do with robots. But but it was a, it's a topic that we hear a lot and so we want to bring that up, especially from an IoT standpoint. But we talked a bit about the collaborative robots in our last session. So, I encourage you to check that out. And some of the things that you can do with that, but this spins off on that with our Cartesian based systems, which is single axes, or multi axis x, y, z Cartesian systems. And so, there's different ways to do that. So, our topic title today is, Beth

Beth Elliott  4:02  

It is "Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have To... Rotate".

Brandon Ellis  4:07  

That's right. Because when we think of motors, most of us think of a spinning shaft. And that's an important thing. I mean, spinning shafts, we use them from all kinds of things, just running the fan in our air conditioner, or our exhaust fan in the bathroom. Sometimes those are very, very important.

Beth Elliott  4:26  

And now those are, those are rotary motors?

Brandon Ellis  4:29  

Those are just motors rotating. But now all of a sudden, what if we need to move something in a linear fashion? And so how do we do that? And that's the topic of today. It doesn't have to rotate. So, motors are more than rotation. And so, we're going to discuss a couple ways to make that happen.

Beth Elliott  4:45  

All right. So, do you want to get into the couple types of rotary motors?

Brandon Ellis  4:49  

There are a few types of motors in general, but most motors rotate, not all of them. So, let's talk about the rotary ones. And so 

Beth Elliott  4:57  

What's a stepper motor?

Brandon Ellis  4:58  

Stepper motors, that's an example, and so. So, there's AC induction motors and standard DC permanent magnet motor or DC motors that are used for strictly rotation. So, when I was talking about the exhaust fan motors or the the air conditioning, you know, fan type motors or pumps or, or even the the motors that that that run your cordless drill and things of that nature. Those aren't the motors we're talking about. Those are just just definite purpose motors that you just put a voltage or a current to them and they they spin at a rate and that's it. We're talking more specifically about motion control type motors, which are motors that we can accurately control their speed and their position. And so sometimes with these types of motors, usually the plan is that the goal is to move the motor to a certain angle or degree accurately, at an accurate speed and then stop it there and then maintain that position until we tell it to move again. And so that that's really what we call a closed loop system or an open loop system. But stepper motors are the usually the open loop. They can be closed loop, but the open loop way of doing that. And servos are another brushless DC and AC servo motors. So, let's talk about you mentioned stepper motors. 

Beth Elliott  6:14  

Yeah, yeah. So, what what's the advantage of that? What's the construction of a stepper motor?

Brandon Ellis  6:19  

Well, I'll just mentioned a few terms. So let me let me roll through those.

Beth Elliott  6:22  

Please. Open loop and closed loop.

Brandon Ellis  6:23  

Open loop and closed loop. So. So open loop. I put the blindfold on me. You're standing there. 

Beth Elliott  6:31  

All right. 

Brandon Ellis  6:32  

And I say take a step forward. I don't know if you took the step or not. You didn't say anything after, you didn't say, Okay, I took a step. You didn't do anything. So, for me, that's open loop. 

Beth Elliott  6:41  

Okay. 

Brandon Ellis  6:42  

I can't see what you're doing. You can hear what I'm asking you to do. But I have to assume that you're doing it. Now if I say take four steps. And you after three steps, you're up against the wall so where you can't take the fourth step. I don't know that. So that's an open loop system. Open loop, meaning there's no feedback device to tell me, the controller, the one commanding the motion, that you took this step.

Beth Elliott  7:09  

Okay.

Brandon Ellis  7:10  

Now, if all of a sudden, with or without the blindfold, or if I take the blindfold off, and I tell you to take a step, and I watch you take the step, then I know you took the step. But if I'm trying to get you up against the wall, but not through the wall, and I see you got some space left, I'll say take another step. And then all of a sudden, you're like, okay, good enough. And we stop. So now I'm controlling you. And my eyes are the feedback. Okay? Or I could wear the blindfold, and you could tell me, I'm up against the wall; okay, that's feedback. Or I took a step, step complete; that's feedback. So, through my ears are feedback. And so those are closed loop systems that allow us to confirm what we've asked, the action that we've asked to do. Steppers have the innate ability to be either open or closed loop.

Beth Elliott  8:00  

okay.

Brandon Ellis  8:02  

Servo motors, which we'll get to in a minute, have to be closed loop.

Beth Elliott  8:05  

They have to have that feedback.

Brandon Ellis  8:07  

They have to have the feedback, and so for practical purposes. I'm sure there's some Oak Ridge National Lab, Department of Energy, Department of Defense stuff that they're working on that they may not always adhere to those. But for those of us that are in the industrial world, that's a good rule of thumb. So, a stepper motor, how can it do that? Well, it comes down to the construction. So, all all both stepper motors and servo motors consist of two parts the rotor. That that is where we derive the term rotate, or rotary, which means it's spinning. So that's the center part of the motor, the shaft typically that turns and, on that shaft, we adhere glue, basically permanent magnets. And so, a permanent magnet is just like a magnet on your refrigerator. Or even in science class, we have these little magnets, and we play around with them. And if you turn on one direction and put two together, they'll repel, you turn it around, they'll snap together and that kind of stuff, they'll attract. So those we refer to as north and south poles. And so, two same poles north to north or south to south will repel, but north to south will attract. And so that's how magnets work. And so, these are just permanent magnet, permanent magnets that are mounted on this shaft. And they're mounted in such a way that you have north south north south alternating poles beside each other in a circle. And so, the second part of of any motor is the stator. And stator is where we drive the term static, which means not moving, so the stator is the part of the motor that is the outside and in there we create magnets electrically. So, if you recall, some of you might recall your eighth-grade science class taking wire and wrapping it around a nail and then apply a voltage to it, hook it to a battery basically, and then you could pick up other metal pieces with it become magnetized. And so, what we're creating is electrical, we're using electrical current to create a magnetic field and that nail would become the magnet, become magnetized. And so that's how we create, and it has a north and a south pole. And so, if we take a lot of these coils, nails with wires around them, basically and stack them around in a circle on the outside of the of the rotor, which spins, then we can apply current in different directions to those coils and create a north and a south and a north and a south and alternating way. And we can control that, based upon the direction of the current. So, if currents flowing one direction, it's norths on one end and south's on the other, and if it's flowing the opposite direction, then then those switch. And so, in a stepper motor, the magnet on the rotor are very, very tightly stacked. So usually you have a magnet pole, a common design of a stepper, and there's various designs, but a common design is you'll have a pole every 1.8 degrees. That means you have 200 steps or poles per 360 degrees or per rotation. So, if I want that motor to rotate 360 degrees, and I'm using the full step of 1.8 degrees, then I would tell it 200 times to take a step, and it would rotate, assuming.

Beth Elliott  11:30  

Assuming what?

Brandon Ellis  11:30  

Assuming, just like your scenario, that it doesn't hit a wall.

Beth Elliott  11:33  

okay, okay,

Brandon Ellis  11:34  

We can assume that it will take 200 steps, which would ended up right back where it started 360 degrees for a rotary standpoint. So that that's the thing that steppers can do. We don't have to have any other devices on there, other than just to tell it, take a step, take a step, take a step. And we can be sure that each time it would take a step in a full stepping. We can do tricks with controllers nowadays, where we can what's called micro steps. So, we can take that 1.8-degree step and start taking smaller increments of it and things of that nature. 

Beth Elliott  12:05  

What's the advantage of that? 

Brandon Ellis  12:07  

Well, you get you get more resolution. I mean, what if you need to take a step that's less than 1.8 degrees, then you can get you can get between polls now. 

Beth Elliott  12:16  

Okay

Brandon Ellis  12:17  

So, you get more resolution per per rotation. But but that's the thing that it can do, because it's got all these little polls. And again, with confidence, we can tell it, take a step and it'll move there. The other thing that steppers do is they can achieve full holding torque at zero speed without any jitter.

Beth Elliott  12:39  

Oh, so they're steady.

Brandon Ellis  12:40  

They're steady. 

Beth Elliott  12:40  

Okay. Oh, okay, gotcha. 

Brandon Ellis  12:42  

And that'll make more sense when we're talking about the servos. 

Beth Elliott  12:45  

Okay. 

Brandon Ellis  12:46  

The downfall of a stepper motor is that it gives you really high torque at low and zero speed. But as you start because we're trying to tell it step, step, step real fast.

Beth Elliott  12:59  

okay.

Brandon Ellis  13:00  

It, it gets to a point where the torque starts falling off with speed. And so usually we use steppers for lower speed, high torque applications, especially if we need the open loop scenario.

Beth Elliott  13:13  

What, what scenario would that be?

Brandon Ellis  13:16  

A lot of times we use open loop in situations where electronics aren't viable. And so, electronics are required for feedback. 

Beth Elliott  13:25  

Because encoders.

Brandon Ellis  13:26  

Encoders are electronic devices. And if it's the one thing I think about is radioactive, even low-level radioactive environment, you can't put the electronics won't survive in that, but a motor will and permanent magnets and coils will. And so, we can use an open loop stepper system in a radioactive environment assuming that it does what it's supposed to do. And that's actually quite common in those environments. But again, your speed begins, your torque begins to drop off exponentially as your speed goes up. And and we start thinking in terms of that drop off of torque being about somewhere between nine to 10 revs per second, which would be at 10 revs per second, that's 60 RPMs reps per minute. 

Beth Elliott  13:54  

Okay, 

Brandon Ellis  14:02  

And so more people think in terms of revs per minute or RPMs than second, but so it's not very fast. And that's where at 10 reps per per second, your torque has already dropped off significantly according to the design of the motor. So again, the concept being if you need high torque at low speeds, and then when you say stop, it stops. That is a stepper and then you can do open loop or closed loop. So, you can put an encoder on a stepper motor and certainly you can put an encoder on anything that rotates and if your controllers capable, it can of controlling whatever's rotating, it can control based upon a position feedback sensor. So, you can that was steppers. We do that really commonly because steppers also are typically lower cost motors compared to servos.

Beth Elliott  15:08  

Okay. Okay. So, the limitations are that it's low speed, if you needed something for high speed, what would you pick for that?

Brandon Ellis  15:18  

Well, you got to take the other side of that high speed and high torque. That's where a servo rotary, servo motor comes into play. And so, it's similar similar construction. Stator, with windings on the outside and rotor with permanent magnets on the shaft, but those magnets are much stronger, much larger. Your poles are not really as close together as as a stepper motor, but we are going to always have a feedback device, in this case, an encoder. And so. So, servos have to be closed loop.

Beth Elliott  15:51  

And servo is an acronym. 

Brandon Ellis  15:54  

We haven't done any

Beth Elliott  15:54  

No, we haven't done any sounds. 

Brandon Ellis  15:56  

I don't remember. Servo. Hey, give it to us. What is it?

Beth Elliott  16:01  

Okay, it sequentially. Goodness gracious. Sequentially Encoded Rotational Variable Operation. No wonder it is an acronym, that is a lot of words. 

Brandon Ellis  16:13  

I'll bet, me included, that less than 1% of the of the population of this earth knows what servo stands for. I may have known that at one time, but I quickly unknew it. 

Beth Elliott  16:26  

I wonder why.

Brandon Ellis  16:27  

Sequentially Encoded Rotational Variable Operation

Beth Elliott  16:31  

Goodness

Brandon Ellis  16:32  

Yeah, imagine, it doesn't roll off the tongue as well as servo.

Beth Elliott  16:34  

No, it doesn't.

Brandon Ellis  16:35  

So, I'm glad that that works. So usually when we're thinking servo, in be it slang, I don't know if it's actually considered good grammar or not, but a lot of times we use servo as both a noun and a verb. So if we're referring to a motor, we'll call it the servo if assuming it is a permanent magnet, DC, or AC servo motor. But when we talk about how it's performing, we may refer to that as servoing which is a verb.

Beth Elliott  16:59  

I bet you spellcheck is gonna say no.

Brandon Ellis  17:03  

Yeah, so. So, what, what we think of, what I think of with servo, with a servo or servoing, is that you're controlling the position accurately, and often. And so most servo control systems. So I said before, one of the advantages of a stepper motor is that it could sit still, totally idle and totally still and have full holding torque. A servo motor is always adjusting.

Beth Elliott  17:31  

Oh, okay. So, it's gonna have a little bit of movement in it no matter what.

Brandon Ellis  17:36  

Yes, because at least if you're applying, you know, if it's having to hold full torque, which, usually you're not holding full torque, unless you have something acting upon that motor to merit full torque. Now in a stepper motor, it can sit there and hold full torque all day long with no nothing on it. But a servo, it works based upon a control loop, a feedback loop, and we refer to those as PIDs.

Beth Elliott  17:59  

What does that stand for?

Brandon Ellis  18:00  

That stands for Proportional Integral and Derivative. That's, that's, that's actually PID is a controls version, I guess you would say as far as controls engineering, and just general motor control we and also temperature control a lot of different controls. When you're controlling something where you have a set point, and then you're looking at what your output is, and you're constantly adjusting the amount of gain or the amount of request, I guess, that you're putting in. So, let's go back to your scenario.

Beth Elliott  18:30  

Okay. 

Brandon Ellis  18:31  

When when I had when I was commanding you to take steps, I could have said, Go to the wall. But you might not understand you only understand steps. And so, I have to control you to the wall. So, I know the goal of get to the wall. But you know how to take steps. And so, if we're doing temperature, for example, you can't say go to a million degrees. You have to say, turn on all your heaters, and then watch the temperature as it's coming up, and then say, okay, continue to do full power, full power. And as you start coming close, you got to start turning, turning the power down. Because if you don't, you're going to overshoot the temperature. And so, your set points, a million degrees, but your rates and all those kind of things are controlled by the controller. And that's all done as part of a PID controller. And so, it's using different things Proportional Integral and Derivative that gets into tuning and that is way above this podcast and the nature of this podcast. And so if you will have questions about that, or goodness, if you want a training on that call our training department, we can take you through all kinds of proportional derivative integrals and how that applies to servo motors, linear motors, things of that nature, and it also applies to temperature but a little differently, but in that industry, but but anyway, so it's that tuning, let's just call it those that you have to tune the system. And then the system is always looking at where you are and trying to decide where it wants you to be and comparing those two and telling you to adjust. It's that adjusting that I'm talking about. So, when when when a servo is commanded to maintain zero velocity and hold torque, it's always adjusting. 

Beth Elliott  20:15  

Okay. Okay, 

Brandon Ellis  20:16  

So, it might be on a micro level, but it's moving. A stepper. No.

Beth Elliott  20:22  

Okay.

Brandon Ellis  20:24  

It's just a difference in the construction. So that's one of the things about the servos. But the so that's not a disadvantage. It's just something you need to be aware of. So, when we talked about, I think it was in the last podcast, we were talking about collaborative robots, and vision inspection, you just robot inspection, vision inspection. And that basically means you're moving a camera around on the end of a robot. If you're, if you're worried about vibration.

Beth Elliott  20:51  

Oh, with the camera, you don't want you 

Brandon Ellis  20:52  

It'll pick up on that. Because robots are servos. Every every axis in a robot is a servo motor. And so they're constantly closing a loop, same thing. Now, not all robots, some there's some six-axis articulated arm and even SCARA robots out there that use steppers. But they're still closed loop, but they're steppers. What's the potential difference between the two? I don't wanna say problem. But what's the difference? If you're looking at industrial robot, we said that industrial robots focus on what two things Beth, do you remember?

Beth Elliott  21:25  

I do. They take, they protect themselves, and they protect the end of arm tooling.

Brandon Ellis  21:30  

That's right. But their focus is speed and accuracy.

Beth Elliott  21:33  

Oh, I'm sorry. I was taking the collaborative. 

Brandon Ellis  21:36  

I'll put you on the spot there. And collaboratives are more about safety. And so so collaborate robots aren't typically fast, and their accuracy may not be that match that of industrial robot. But nevertheless, if you have a stepper system, closed loop stepper system on a robot, knowing what you now know about steppers, what are you going to see that's a big difference between a servo based robot and a stepper based robot? It's going to be speed. So, the stepper can't go that fast without losing its, you know, losing its torque. And so, you're gonna have you're gonna be forced to go to slower, slower speeds. And so that's just one big difference. But there are stepper, closed loop stepper systems out there on robots, certainly. And a lot of times they're lower cost, but they do you have trade-offs, there's there's nothing for free. And so but going back to the rotary servo. So, a rotary servo advantages the design of a rotary servo means that while we're able to get full torque at zero speed, less the adjusting that's going on, we're still going to refer to that as zero speed, we can hold constant torque all the way to the point of the rated speed of that servo motor. Now, the top speed when we start seeing the torque drop off on a stepper, I said was around nine probably could be or even around eight RPS, revs per second, all the way up to, which is, which is about 48 RPMs, I guess. Is that right? I'm sorry, 480. I said 60 RPMs earlier, didn't I?

Beth Elliott  22:03  

I think so.

Brandon Ellis  22:27  

Yeah. 600 RPMs. correction. So here. So yeah, my math was wrong. It's early. So, but a servo motor, a servo motor, it typically in most of the servo motors with the Yaskawa motors that we that we represent and partner with, 3000 RPMs is where that happens. So instead of 600 RPMs, now we're talking about 3000 RPMs. And then that's just where the torque starts dropping off. Now on a servo motor, or on a stepper motor, I said earlier at 10 RPMs, your your I'm sorry, 10 revs per second, 600, RPMs, you're already down the curve, usually, depending on the construction, but usually at 10 revs per second, your torque is probably half of what what it would be at zero speed. But a servo motor at 3000 RPM, it's still 100% of what it would be. So, at 6000 RPMs is when it's actually zero. So, what's half of that? 4500 RPMs. Half of 3000 is 1500, so 4500 RPMs. Just checking my math this morning, I already made one mistake. So, at 4500 RPMs. You're about where torque-wise, percentagewise where the stepper would have been. So, you can get some really high speeds and still good torque with a servo motor and that's the advantage of that. So yeah, and it comes down again to the construction.

Beth Elliott  24:44  

The limitations are that it has to be tuned, but I saw where Yaskawa's got some tuning-less.

Brandon Ellis  24:49  

Well, it's still being tuned. It's just being, it's kind of AI for servo motors. So, it's a learning process where it's constantly monitoring. We calculate things called the inertia of the system. And so, it's constantly doing that calculation itself based upon what it's feeling. And so, if it realizes the load has changed, then it can adjust what it does. I mean, if I tell you, here's a plastic bucket, pick it up, and it's empty, and you pick it up. And then I put, you know, 30 pounds of stuff in that bucket and say pick it up, then you're going to notice a difference. And your brain is going to say, apply more force to pick this bucket up. If you apply the same force with the empty bucket, you're going to throw the bucket through the ceiling, right. So that's what the Yaskawa system is able to do is with this, they call it tuning-less. It means you don't have to mess with it, we'll take care of it, and it learns and teaches itself as it goes.

Beth Elliott  25:44  

That's nice. So what applications are better for servo motors or step, then stepper motors?

Brandon Ellis  25:51  

Anytime you've got to have full torque at high speeds. That's where we use servos. Servos come typically at a bit higher cost than steppers. Although the cost of a servo motor has come down significantly over the over the last decade and a half. But it used to be probably a 10 times difference in cost maybe more, maybe even 20 times. But now, today, the cost have have come closer, but typically a stepper motor still because, again, if you're doing open loop, you're not having to pay for an encoder. 

Beth Elliott  26:24  

Okay. 

Brandon Ellis  26:24  

And so typically, a stepper motor is still a bit lower cost, then a servo. But again, it comes down to your application. If you need something to stop with no movement, you're not going to get there with a servo unless you can power it off and apply a brake or something along those lines. And power it off if no torque, if no back torque is needed.

Beth Elliott  26:48  

Okay, why would you power it off?

Brandon Ellis  26:50  

Because you need it to not move.

Beth Elliott  26:53  

Wouldn't that stop production?

Brandon Ellis  26:55  

Well, no, I mean, sometimes we power things off. So, in robots, if well, not even that sometimes we there are systems out there, where we want to move especially on a vertical. So, we may use the servo to really apply some, some some torque to to raise you know, to lift up that 30-pound bucket and hold it and suspend it in the air. But once it gets there, it's just going to hold it forever.

Beth Elliott  27:18  

Oh, so you can just stop it there. 

Brandon Ellis  27:19  

So, we can apply a brake and then disable the servo. Which by the way, this is a what was I going to call it? This is a let me try that again. Brandology Word of Wisdom. 

Beth Elliott  27:34  

Oh, okay. Let's hear it.

Brandon Ellis  27:36  

So probably everybody in the whole world knows this. If you put a brake on a servo motor, and it stays on, what's the servo motor always trying to do?

Beth Elliott  27:44  

It's trying to adjust itself.

Brandon Ellis  27:46  

It's always trying to move, what's a brake trying to do?

Beth Elliott  27:48  

It's trying to stop it.

Brandon Ellis  27:49  

So, what happens?

Beth Elliott  27:50  

I would think it'd wear out.

Brandon Ellis  27:51  

Yes. And so, it'll heat up the motor a lot, because it's trying to move against the load that's not letting it move. And it can also heat up the brake because of friction. And so, if you're going to apply break, put it in position, apply the brake and then turn off the motor, and then turn on the motor, release the brake, and go from there. That's a Brandology Word to the Wise. But yeah, that's why we would do that. So, I just said something, though. Use a servo motor to lift a bucket.

Beth Elliott  28:22  

Yeah. So how did they do that? I mean if it's round.

Brandon Ellis  28:26  

It's round. It's rotating. So, I guess

Beth Elliott  28:28  

If you don't have a pulley system.

Brandon Ellis  28:29  

If you're, well, if you're you could, you could be like the, the the old, you know, the wells that had buckets that went down in there and just extend that shaft out and spin it with a rope on it and just let it take up all the slack and pull the bucket up. That's one way.

Beth Elliott  28:44  

Well, there's got to be better way there, Brandon, a more efficient way.

Brandon Ellis  28:48  

Well, especially if you want to make sure the bucket gets down in the ground or down under the water. You can't push a rope, and so how do we do that? Well, there's a couple of different ways. But before we get into those, the pulley systems and the mechanical ways to do that. There's also an electrical way.

Beth Elliott  29:04  

Yeah, 

Brandon Ellis  29:05  

Yeah. 

Beth Elliott  29:05  

Tell us about it.

Brandon Ellis  29:06  

We refer to that as a linear motor.

Beth Elliott  29:07  

Okay, these are these are the flat ones, right?

Brandon Ellis  29:10  

Well, they can be. They can be flat. They can be as far as the magnet stack can be round. We represent a company called LinMot that makes the shafts for smaller motors that are the magnet shaft is round, but let's talk about the construction. Then Yaskawa makes the flat, platen-type, we call platen-type linear motors. And they can, they can move the world with those things.  They're extremely strong. But let's talk about that. So, we talked about a rotary servo.

Beth Elliott  29:36  

Uh huh. 

Brandon Ellis  29:37  

And similar to a stepper, you had permanent magnet on the rotor, and you had coils on the stator. We talked about how rotor meant rotation and stator means static or still. You have to flip those two on their head-first of all, so in a linear motor the rotor doesn't move, and the stator moves. And so, remember the stators the coils the rotor is the permanent magnets. And so, imagine if you will, and everybody's got to use their mind's eye here, to take a servo motor that has stator windings, you know electrical coil windings on the outside. And then on the inside in a circle again glued to the shaft are permanent magnets and we're going to not cut the whole thing in half, but we're going to cut each one so that we can cut it on one side and then fold it out. So, think of think of, of slicing. I don't know, what would you slice? Slicing something that's round and then folding it out, maybe an orange. So, so, you slice one side of the orange and then you, you basically fold it out flat. So, all the little orange slices now are laying flat across the table where they were round inside of the orange,

Beth Elliott  30:49  

okay,

Brandon Ellis  30:50  

But they're still connected. So, we're going to do that and lay everything flat. And so, the magnets specifically is what I'm getting at, we're gonna instead of having those magnets mounted in a round fashion, we're going to mount them on a flat surface long surface. And then we're going to basically mount the stator, which is the windings, above those magnets at a certain distance. Now, there's got to be some mechanical stuff come into play here, because you need to make sure that that that the windings and the magnets don't touch. But you also want to make sure, remember that we put the nail inside of the coil and we put electricity on it, and we pick things up with it because it was magnetized. If that nail was too far away from the stuff, it wouldn't, it wouldn't have an influence on it. And so, you got to get the magnet close, the stator, which is an electromagnet close close enough to the permanent magnet that you actually the north and the south poles actually can affect each other; we refer to that as a magnetic field. And so, we got to be within that magnetic field. And so, you have to you have to maintain that that we call it air gap, that distance, if it's too wide, you don't get the influence. If it's too close you you have a wreck, you have a mechanical, you know, combination. And so, you want to maintain that. So, there is some some things that have to come in as far as precision. But that's how the system works is now all of a sudden, as we're changing those north and south poles in the stator, it's moving linearly across these permanent magnets that are that are statically mounted, and so that's where we flip on our head. Now all of a sudden, the magnets used to do the rotating, but they're actually their static. 

Beth Elliott  32:29  

They're stationary now. 

Brandon Ellis  32:30  

They're stationary and the coils, the electromagnets are actually moving. So, what's the advantage? Well, you can get some extremely crazy fast accelerations and decelerations, you can get some really large thrust. That's, that's force in a linear, linear direction. Remember, we're not rotating anymore. So, it's not torque. It's thrust. And so, torque is basically, thrust is basically force in a direction. And so linear motors can do some crazy fast, fantastic things. And so, we are now but we're taking electric motion. And instead of it rotating,

Beth Elliott  33:13  

it's linear. 

Brandon Ellis  33:13  

It's linear. And the so so where would you see where you might see linear motors? In industry, anything that's really high speed, cleanroom environments, because they're usually there's an air gap. There's not a lot of moving parts in there. So, the bearings and the grease and stuff kind of go away. We can use food grade or cleanroom grade bearings and things of that nature to do all the support. And that becomes, you know, the the manageable thing. Whereas the motor, remember it's just moving on magnetic, it's moving on magnetism. So, there's nothing between them but air, so there's nothing to wear out. And so, their longevity is just unbelievable. The speed is just blistering fast.

Beth Elliott  33:57  

And it can stop quick too, can't it?

Brandon Ellis  33:59  

Stops, starts quick, all these things. The down, the downside is they're not usually inexpensive, compared to a mechanical means of motion. But a linear motor. So where might you have experienced a linear motor? 

Beth Elliott  34:04  

That's what I was wondering.

Brandon Ellis  34:15  

If it might have been the theme park if, if you've ever been on one of these these roller coasters. There are some that use steam, steam catapult system like like they use

Beth Elliott  34:26  

Dollywood. 

Brandon Ellis  34:27  

Yeah. And then there's others that that actually use linear motors to do this to launch the cars. You know, instead of click, click, click going up the big hill and using momentum, they do a horizontal you just start from a horizontal setting, seating position and all of a sudden, bam, you're off and gone. And so that's an example of some of the stuff that they do. And so, we we partner with LinMot, they're linear servos and they do the smaller more compact servos and then Yaskawa takes it from there. So, anything that's above the LinMot capacity goes with, with Yaskawa, and they can, they can move mountains with their stuff. They focus on on, you know, the medium to to higher capacity and capability type systems and then LinMot catches everything below.

Beth Elliott  35:18  

That's why they have the food grade, don't they, LinMot does? 

Brandon Ellis  35:20  

Yeah. 

Beth Elliott  35:21  

Okay. Okay,

Brandon Ellis  35:22  

And Yaskawa has got some of that stuff too with their Sigma tracks. And the Sigma track is with Yaskawa you can buy the components and put them on the floor, you got to have that floor level and all this kind of stuff and construct it all it's a bit more complex. But you can go the whole length of goodness gracious, football fields, miles, whatever, it with a linear motor. Putting these magnets down and very precisely. It has to be controlled, the air gaps got to be handled, and they can move vehicles. You're not going to launch a roller coaster car with LinMot. That's not what it's designed to do.

Beth Elliott  35:55  

No, they're too small. 

Brandon Ellis  35:55  

Yeah, but if I'm placing a clip inside of a high-speed operation on a machine, and I need to knock these clips in extremely fast. And we're talking about where a million cycles happens in, you know, across a year or two and not many, many years, then you want that LinMot linear motor doing that - light payload very fast, very quick accelerations decelerations. And if you tried to do that mechanically, as we'll talk about, you don't have the wear and so that motor's gonna last a long, long time. And so, there's advantages to those. But comparatively, a linear motor is more expensive than a rotary servo motor. And that, of course, is typically more expensive than a stepper motor. So, we're kind of going as far as cost goes down.

Beth Elliott  36:42  

Okay, and then the flat, the surface has to be completely flat, doesn't it? 

Brandon Ellis  36:46  

On a linear motor? 

Beth Elliott  36:47  

Yeah

Brandon Ellis  36:47  

Yeah, if you're, if if it's a pre-constructed linear motor, then that's already taken care of for you. So, we have that with LinMot. And again, on Yaskawa they refer to that product is the Sigma track. And that's, that means we put it all together for you. 

Beth Elliott  36:51  

Oh, I gotcha. 

Brandon Ellis  37:02  

And the mechanics are there, the linear rails and stuff are supporting everything. And so, when you get it, you just mount it in place and it's ready to go.

Beth Elliott  37:09  

Plug and play, okay,

Brandon Ellis  37:10  

And it. Because it's quite an engineering problem when you start doing some of the bigger things. 

Beth Elliott  37:15  

Yeah, I can imagine.

Brandon Ellis  37:17  

But so that's the electrical way to go linearly.

Beth Elliott  37:19  

What's the other way to go? 

Brandon Ellis  37:20  

Mechanically. And so, you can get linear motion out of a rotary-type application or device, such as a motor, we just discussed how you can do it electrically. But you can also do that mechanically. And of course, that is the definition of work is, is we are always taking either electrical energy and turning it into mechanical energy or vice versa. So anytime we're, well let's talk about the nail and the coil. So, if we, if we take the the nail and we wrap it in wire and apply electricity, we make magnetism. If that coil is open, and instead of putting electricity on it, we mechanically instead of moving a nail, but you know, the nail becomes magnetized. But take the nail away, and now we take a magnet, something that's that's a permanent magnet, and instead of putting a battery on the coil, we put a meter, an electrical meter, that shows current, and we mechanically move the magnet in and out of the coil, then you'll see the needle on the ammeter, which is a current meter, go up. So now we're putting in mechanical energy by moving the magnet mechanically, and we're getting electrical energy. Or we put a piece of metal in there, and we put in electrical energy and we get, we can get mechanical if the if the if the nail is allowed to move. Because or if it's a magnet, if you put a magnet in there, let's use that as an example. That's better than a nail, the nail becomes a magnet. If we put a magnet in there and just just are able to suspend it and we apply electrical energy, that magnet will move. So, we've turned electrical into mechanical and that's what linear motor is. But there are other ways to do this. And so you mentioned belts and pulleys.

Beth Elliott  39:05  

Yes. Yes. So, they're. Do you want to go over the belt driven actuators?

Brandon Ellis  39:10  

Actuators and so 

Beth Elliott  39:11  

There's so are actuators and motors the same thing? 

Brandon Ellis  39:16  

No.

Beth Elliott  39:16  

Oh, okay.

Brandon Ellis  39:18  

An actuator actuates something. And so, it converts. It converts one type of motion into another.

Beth Elliott  39:25  

That okay, what you're just saying. So, in a motor?

Brandon Ellis  39:28  

A motor creates rotary motion, and an actuator will convert that rotary motion into linear.

Beth Elliott  39:36  

Okay, so a linear servo motor is different than a linear actuator?

Brandon Ellis  39:43  

That's right, because a linear servo is is creating linear motion electrically and not mechanically. So, a mechanical conversion of motion is going from a rotating, like a servo motor or stepper, a rotation and turning that into linear motion. So, you, I don't know that anybody uses clotheslines nowadays, maybe they do.

Beth Elliott  40:06  

See it movies.

Brandon Ellis  40:07  

In the city, probably. In the cities, especially in an apartment, I think of apartment living up in New York, New York City. But you've seen in the movies and things of that nature where you have a pulley system for your clothesline. And so, you hang, you hang your garment on, and then you you pay it out, I guess you would say with the rope, you put the next one, the next one, the next one next thing, you know, you've got all your clothes hanging out there. So, they're hanging on the bottom side of that, that rope or clothesline, and then it goes out through a pulley and comes back to you. And it's a continuous loop. And so, there's a pulley at your side. And so, you can by moving the rope, you can create linear motion.

Beth Elliott  40:50  

Okay, that's the belt driven.

Brandon Ellis  40:53  

A belt driven system would be two pulleys, but we wouldn't pull the rope, we would turn the pulley. 

Beth Elliott  40:59  

Oh, okay. 

Brandon Ellis  41:01  

So, we take the motor shaft and we put it inside the pulley. And then the rope, which we will refer to as a belt, because we don't usually use ropes for that can can, as the as the pulley rotates, the belt would follow it. And then the two ends of the belt would be where the clothes are. We refer to that as a carriage. And so, as you move clockwise, it would go one direction and counterclockwise, it would come back the opposite direction. And so that's a very, very rudimentary version of explaining a belt driven actuator. And so, belt driven actuators have pulleys at each end. And then they have a carriage. Now that carriage might be supported, mechanically. So that it's got, you know, it's not just floating in space. But so, if you mount something to, it's not going to just, you know, fold over or something. And so, we may do some type of a linear bearing, just to support that. But what's really doing it is the fact that we're turning a pulley and the carriage moves to the left or the right. So rotary motion, putting in rotary motion from a servo motor and getting linear motion. So mechanically, we're converting motion. Okay.

Beth Elliott  41:19  

Okay. So how do you what do you How would you use that?

Brandon Ellis  42:15  

So, we have different types of actuators. So, the company we partner with on actuation is Tolomatic. And they have a lot of different brands, or different types, not brands, but different series, I should say, of actuators ranging from small high speed all the way up to very big and tough actuators. And so, they're different types. So, a belt driven actuator is what we'd be talking about here. And so, belt driven means that typically, you would apply that where you want high speed, with relatively good accuracy. That's, that that gives you the advantage, that pulley gives you an advantage. So how do you know, what Brandon, what do you mean, where's the advantage coming from? Well, the advantage comes from the fact that it's a pulley not because you're getting some type of; we use pullies for mechanical advantage when we're doing multiple pullies and stuff and you know, YouTube that you can see some fantastic videos on how they can stack up pullies and get, when you pull the rope, you can lift up, you know, 100 pounds with very little effort. Now, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about mechanical advantage in that regard. But I am talking about linear advantage. And so, Beth, I'm sure you know how to remember how to, the formula for calculating the circumference of a circle?

Beth Elliott  43:27  

Oh, you went over this the other day. It went in one ear and went out the other.

Brandon Ellis  43:33  

So, we call that 2-pi r, where r is the radius.

Beth Elliott  43:36  

I should've written this down. 

Brandon Ellis  43:37  

And Pi is the constant, 3.141, whatever, whatever. But two times the radius is also when you double the radius of a circle that equals the diameter. So, it's just the same to say the diameter times pi. And so, if you have a one-inch pulley, one inch diameter times pi, which again 3.141, then that means every time you rotate that, the belt in this case, like the rope on the clothesline, will move if I rotate at one full revolution, it will rotate or it'll move, will rotate 360 degrees, but will move the diameter which is one-inch times 3.141. So, we'll move 3.141 inches, linearly. And so, one revolution will give us three basically little over three inches of travel. And that's a bit of a mechanical advantage. Because if I change, if I double that, then now I'm going 6.28 inches for every revolution. So, we can, we can quickly turn rotation into some some 

Beth Elliott  44:44  

Fast

Brandon Ellis  44:45  

Some fast movement. Now there's things you have to consider. We again, I mentioned inertia. You were talking about Yaskawa doing it's tuning-less. It's automatic tuning. It's calculating inertias, so there's nothing for free. There's always trade-offs. And so, as that pulley gets larger, what we call the reflected inertia, how much the inertia affects the motor amplifies as well. So sometimes we have to put some types of gearing or anything like that just to help with that. Again, that's more of an advanced topic for sizing, something we can certainly help with, but not in this podcast. But so, a lot of your belt driven systems, though, will require the addition of a gearbox if you're using a servo, rotary servo motor, but that's how they work. And so, we can use belt driven actuators to move quickly. And the accuracy is reasonable. Now, still, it's good. But the other type of linear actuator is a ball screw actuator or just a screw type actuator. Used to we used to choose between Acme screws and ball screws. So, what's the difference in Acme screw is kind of like. Again, I'm going very low on this but a nut and a bolt. And so, the bolt is the carriage the thing that moves left to right, and as I turn the bolt, if the bolt is fixed, the nut will move up and down the screw, the shaft of the bolt, right. And so, an Acme screw is just that it's it's, a it's kind of a more friction based thread. It's a, you know, metal on metal or something along those lines. A ball screw we replaced the nut and and the screw, but we replaced the nut with a ball bearing based nut if you will, so and then the screw becomes has to be ground so that it will handle those ball ball bearings. And so now all of a sudden, you don't have just metal going through threads of another piece of metal, you actually have these ball bearings that are rolling in grooves that resemble a screw thread.

Beth Elliott  45:53  

Like a pea pod? If you have the balls, like if you open up

Brandon Ellis  46:55  

You talking about peas you eat? 

Beth Elliott  46:56  

Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Ellis  46:56  

Yeah, those resemble ball bearings. And I guess the pod resembles a ball bearing race. So yeah, that's a good one, Beth. 

Beth Elliott  47:07  

My analogies, hmmm 

Brandon Ellis  47:09  

Pea pods 

Beth Elliott  47:09  

Might need to work on that. 

Brandon Ellis  47:12  

No, yeah, I mean, it so it's a ball bearing. So, it's rolling. So, it's less friction, things of that nature. And so, you don't see Acme screws much anymore like you used to. Ball bearings used to be, any of the ball screws were more expensive, but again, those costs have come down. And so much in fact, the most people just stick with a ball screw-based system. So, it's lower friction and high accuracy. But now all of a sudden, a typical pitch or lead now. So, screws have so many threads per inch. That saying if you every time you rotate the screw, if you had one thread per inch, then every time you rotate it, that nut would move an inch, okay. Because it's following the threads. Ball screws work in similar fashion. But a typical lead for a ball screw might be point one or point two inches per revolution. And so now the servo motor, if it turns one time, is moving, if it's a point one inch, lead or pitch, the carriage is now going to move linearly, point one inches, a 10th of an inch. Now remember, on the belt driven.

Beth Elliott  48:22  

It was, it was a lot longer.

Brandon Ellis  48:24  

We were moving three inches.

Beth Elliott  48:25  

The diameter

Brandon Ellis  48:26  

With a one-inch pulley. And so, but now the accuracy is unbelievable with the ball screw. So, we can use ball screws for moving, typically slower speeds, but higher accuracy. We can also get a lot of thrust force, kind of like the linear servo motor gives a lot of thrust force, we can get even more thrust force from a ball screw, because we get the mechanical advantage of a screw.

Beth Elliott  48:53  

Okay

Brandon Ellis  48:54  

So, you've seen

Beth Elliott  48:56  

Oh, instead of, I gotcha.

Brandon Ellis  48:57  

So, the mechanical advantage.

Beth Elliott  48:59  

Instead of a nail.

Brandon Ellis  49:00  

Yeah, so a nail, you use a hammer to drive a nail, big, heavy hammer, or use a really light screwdriver to drive a screw. Why is that? Well screw is a simple machine, in the design, it's considered a simple machine in the way. So you can take a rotary motion, and you're driving the screw in which is linear motion. But if you tried to take a nail and press it with your hand, you're not going to press it into the board, but you can take a screw and drive it into material fairly easily. And so that's the advantage of a screw. And so, you can get high, high thrust force and that's what you're doing is you're driving or thrusting that screw, that piece of metal into that piece of wood, or whatever it is. And so, you can get really high press forces. So, we use, we combine it with with our Yaskawa servo motors and the Tolomatic actuators, we can do presses, servo presses and things of that nature to where we can press parts into electrically. So why wouldn't you do that hydraulically, or pneumatically which is with air? Well, you can, but hydraulics are dirty.

Beth Elliott  50:03  

I was gonna say they're gonna be messy.

Brandon Ellis  50:04  

They're messy. And then though you get good controllability out of out of a hydraulic, if you have that, have you had the capability to control the hydraulic valve, we actually refer to those as servo valves. Because we're servoing the valve to control the flow and things of that nature. But you can use an all-electric system, so a rotary servo motor into a ball screw type actuator. So, when we're pressing, though, usually it's not, it's not a carriage in the middle, you know, rolling up and down an actuator. So, we refer to that as a rod type actuator. So linear, I'm sorry, a belt driven actuator is always rod-less. 

Beth Elliott  50:45  

Okay, 

Brandon Ellis  50:46  

Yeah. But a ball screw actuator can be rod or rod-less. And so, rod, again, resembles a cylinder, hydraulic cylinder, pneumatic cylinder, something like that. And, and then because the screw the capability, a screw is simple machine, we're converting rotary motion into linear motion with a screw, we can produce really high thrust force at decent speed, and good accuracy. And so that's where we use ball screw systems a lot. We also use them in Cartesian systems for positioning, because we were we need the accuracy.

Beth Elliott  51:17  

Gotcha. Okay. Okay. So what, what are the advantages of rod, or rod-less?

Brandon Ellis  51:24  

Well, it's it rod acts like a rod and the rod-less doesn't. So, if you you can take, so you can take a rod-less actuator and and apply to it or mountain to the carriage, something that's going to press up or down. But when you pull your press, you know, whatever your part is your your end of arm tooling, I guess you would call it, when you pull that up, you still have the actuator in the way. So, it's got a stick down, or across, or whatever. A rod type is extending, and then retracting. And so, when it retracts, there's nothing behind it. There's nothing left there to get in the way. And so, if you're having to press something, and then come up and get out of the way, so that it can progress through, a rod type actuator is a better solution. 

Beth Elliott  52:09  

Okay. Okay.

Brandon Ellis  52:10  

What's next?

Beth Elliott  52:11  

Well, I was looking,

Brandon Ellis  52:12  

I'm totally off the outline.

Beth Elliott  52:14  

You did. So, there's another advantage between the ball screw versus the belt driven. They're about the same prices, aren't they, though?

Brandon Ellis  52:23  

Well, they. Usually, a ball screws a little bit more expensive than a belt.

Beth Elliott  52:29  

Oh, I just have $2 signs on it.

Brandon Ellis  52:32  

Well, because you but but but again, and there's some that argue, oh, you can do this with my tuning. And this gets back to tuning of the servo and stuff like that. My rule of thumb is if it's a belt driven actuator, go ahead and budget putting a gearbox on. And if it's a ball screw, you may not have to and make it just what we call direct drive, which means the motors connected directly to the coupled to the ball screw, and that's it. That's all you need. And so that's where the extra costs can come into a belt-driven actuator, is because you've got a servo motor and the actuator plus the gearbox. And then but whereas a ball screw actuator, you'd have just the motor and the actuator. That's it.

Beth Elliott  53:13  

What's what are, are there any other limitations to the ball screw actuators?

Brandon Ellis  53:18  

Well, you just get to the point where you can't go any faster. And then length comes into play. So, So, belt driven actuators can go very long. 

Beth Elliott  53:25  

Yep, yeah.

Brandon Ellis  53:26  

A ball screw, it's a piece of steel. When you start getting there's, there's all kinds of tricks you can do to extend them. But once you start getting to a certain point, that still a screw becomes more like a jump rope and starts what we call wagging. And so, if you start spinning it fast, it's going to start wobbling in air. Kind of like a jump rope would in between points. And so that becomes catastrophic, usually, with bearings, bearings in the supports don't don't like that very much. But so, you want to avoid that avoid the wag. But that's, that's one limitation of the mechanics of a ball screw. 

Beth Elliott  54:01  

Okay

Brandon Ellis  54:02  

It really comes down to length. 

Beth Elliott  54:03  

Okay, this, a lot of this sounds a lot really complex, so how can elliTek help people?

Brandon Ellis  54:10  

Well, you know, this is what we do with our so we've we've talked about our pre-engineered solutions. 

Beth Elliott  54:15  

Yeah, I wanted to talk about the smart servo actuators.

Brandon Ellis  54:19  

Yeah, exactly. That's part of our pre-engineered solutions. And so, we've done all this work for you, especially in the Cartesian based systems. So where would you use a Cartesian based system, if you're, if you're doing an X, Y, or X, Y, Z type application, maybe you're doing dispensing, maybe you're doing cutting, you know, different types of cutting systems, things that nature, gluing, and maybe even inspection, that kind of thing. But you want to do a Cartesian system to do that. And we would use a Cartesian system and those verses why wouldn't you just use a robot? You talk about robots with cameras. Why wouldn't you just use a robot, Brandon? Well, if you've got a really long area or larger area, say a four foot by six-foot area or something like four by eight area, then that's not easily done with a robot because of reach.

Beth Elliott  55:06  

I could see the robot have to be huge.

Brandon Ellis  55:08  

It would have to be just because of the reach. And and so, you know, you're, you're, and you don't have those types of reaches with collaboratives, so you're gonna be guarding that sucker, we've talked about that. So, it takes up a lot of floor space. Whereas a Cartesian system, we can be exactly four feet by eight feet, and not one inch more other than, you know, things that we need just to guard the system. So Cartesian systems make a lot of sense in that regard. So, we have put together actuators for for Cartesian systems and engineered those already. If it's not exactly right, we can engineer those for you. Size everything up so that you know that it's going to work and perform at the speeds in the in the thrust and torques and things that you need. You don't have to worry about the inertia stuff and all the stuff that I went on about. And even the tuning, we can take care of so 

Beth Elliott  55:10  

And the sizing?

Brandon Ellis  55:56  

The sizing, and yeah. And so, and then we have just our rod type servo actuators. So, if you have a pressing application, or a dispensing application that requires a rod-type where you're pushing on something to in order to dispense. Those systems are already put together and sized. And so, we can take it there, or we can make some quick adjustments and get you squared away there. So, it's not a "Industrial Automation - It Doesn't Have To..." is supposed to be taking complex topics and bringing them down to a way that folks can understand. And this is just a really common can be a really complex subject. And so, I guess the the way that we do that is say, just give us a call, we'll we'll walk you through all that stuff if you need it. It's not it's not the end of the world. And we do it a lot.

Beth Elliott  56:45  

Yeah,

Brandon Ellis  56:46  

You know, you and I talked about that, for this topic, that we went back and forth, as far as the complexity associated. Did this make a good topic? And I hope, I sincerely hope everybody has got something from it.

Beth Elliott  56:58  

I've learned. I've learned even after we talked the other day, I've learned more today. So

Brandon Ellis  57:04  

It's, it's, of course, it's something that's near and dear to my heart. Because it's one of the first things I started doing as an electrical engineer. I didn't know that all electrical engineers shouldn't know how to calculate and size motors. I just had a mentor, who was an electrical engineer as well, but had been around it for years. He taught me all this stuff when I first started my career and, and again, I just just really enjoy it. It's really cool making motion. It's it's like the cool part of building a house is framing when you frame the walls, and the boring parts, all the stuff that's inside of the wall, the insulation and that kind of stuff nobody wants to do. But But when you start standing those walls up, you're really seeing things happen quickly. Well, motion control can be the same way. Once you're actually starting to make motion, you actually see things happening, robotics, same way. And so, and honestly, data is the same way. And that's reason our, my attraction to those to those types of applications has always kind of led our company. But but yeah, that our pre-engineered systems takes a lot of that complexity out. So please, please, please, if you don't understand something I've said, or if I've hand waved through something and you want more information, let us know, reach out. Because the main thing is, it's not anything to be fearful of, we can get you through and motion control has come so much further than it once was, when I started. We used to have to actually specify the magnet stacks and the coil windings and everything, the whole construction of the motor. And it would take six to eight weeks to get the motor because they would build it to our specifications. And that's not, that's not this stuff that you would expect working in a laboratory or research facility. This was just, this was just how the industry was. And so 

Beth Elliott  58:47  

It's come a long way.

Brandon Ellis  58:48  

It has and, and you had motor companies that manufactured the servo motors or stepper motors. And then you had other companies that manufactured the, what we called the drives or amplifiers that drive those things. And then another company yet would make the controller that would control the drives that were driving the motors. And so, the drive of course handles all that switching that we talked about the north, south, north, south of the coils and that kind of stuff. So, you have to have that component in addition to just the motor. But yeah, back then we had to work with three different companies and figure out how to get it all working together. And there was not a lot of standards, and it was a crazy thing. Well now, nearly 30 years later.

Beth Elliott  59:27  

You've got pre-engineered systems that are already put together for you that you can just put in and go.

Brandon Ellis  59:32  

And tuning, tuning-less servos.

Beth Elliott  59:34  

The AI in that. That's amazing. 

Brandon Ellis  59:36  

Yeah. So, so, it's come a long way. But I think there's also a lot of benefit to just having an understanding of how the system work, how the pieces, especially from a troubleshooting standpoint. 

Beth Elliott  59:36  

Yeah. 

Brandon Ellis  59:42  

A lot of times with with our training through our training center, when we're training maintenance folks, we really focus in not, we're not focusing in on programming the servo system. We're focusing in on how to troubleshoot that servo system. And the telltale signs to let you know that if you know if this is what it looks like, these are the things that it could be and not these so we can eliminate things. Because their jobs are to get the piece of equipment up and going as quickly as possible. And, and they do that, by by by you know, being able to understand these, these things lead to this. And this has nothing to do with that. So, we can eliminate things and that kind of thing. So just teaching that whole troubleshooting method. But anyway, off topic. 

Beth Elliott  1:00:36  

No, it's right on topic.

Brandon Ellis  1:00:40  

Brandon Ellis staying on topic. So that said, it's been interesting podcast.

Beth Elliott  1:00:49  

It has. I hope people have enjoyed it. And please message us if you've got any questions about this topic, and or if you want, if you want Brandon to go into more deeper topics, more complex ones, let us know. And you know, I'll be confused the whole time, but somebody, you guys will understand. 

Brandon Ellis  1:01:06  

I don't think there's anybody if you request that then you're probably my best friend in the world. But I don't know, the majority of folks would say yeah, let's let's get into some physics of how motors work and that kind of thing. But it is, it is a, it's a fantastic thing that we do in industrial automation. And so hopefully you got something out today. If you if you want to make fun of something I've said or my bad math skills at the beginning that kind of stuff, and then sure, certainly use the comment field with that be be be be nice. But nevertheless, good podcast today. So, www I always forget, forget this www.elliTek.com is our website, e-l-l-i-T-e-k, and there's all kinds of resources on that website that you can check out. But our pre-engineered solutions are part of that as well as our robot cells and in just the partners that we've mentioned today from Yaskawa to LinMot to many others.

Beth Elliott  1:01:16  

Tolomatic

Brandon Ellis  1:01:22  

Tolomatic, as well. Yes, thank you. And, and so please get on our website, check some of that stuff out, give us a call. And then Hanwha Robotics, we announced that at the beginning this podcast, is our new collaborative line. And it's a great, great, great collaborative option. We have other collaborative options with some of the the industrial lines that we carry. But what we like about Hanwha is it's got a really great ROI, return on investment, because it is a lower cost unit, and it's extremely capable. But I really love the interface and how simplistic it is. So, give us a call free demo, or give us an email freedemo@ellitek.com for that.

Beth Elliott  1:02:43  

That email will be on the show notes as well.

Brandon Ellis  1:02:46  

Perfect. 

Beth Elliott  1:02:47  

They'll be there. And if you guys want to give us a call, shout out out at us. It's 865-409-1555. And all our social handles will be on the show notes as well. So

Brandon Ellis  1:02:58  

Thanks for joining us. Yeah, so this was fun for me. 

Beth Elliott  1:03:03  

This one's right. Yeah, it was right up your alley. I was lost most of the time, but you brought it back. 

Brandon Ellis  1:03:07  

I didn't have a couple let me just get some sound effects in here. I was so focused in, uber-focused on motion that I forgot, I forgot that I had control of the sounds. So thank you guys for joining us today. And and thank you so much for continuing to subscribe and to download and stream our podcasts. We appreciate all the feedback we've gotten.

Beth Elliott  1:03:35  

Please rate and review and subscribe. 

Brandon Ellis  1:03:37  

That's right. And so give us a like if you like what you're hearing and and then certainly share us with all the folks that you know, and we can continue to build our audience. We've we are now approaching 1500, getting close to 1500 downloads. So let's keep after that, we'll keep making some good, hopefully good material for you guys. So, thank you very much. Beth, have a great day. 

Beth Elliott  1:04:02  

Hey, thank you for your expertise, Brandon.

Brandon Ellis  1:04:04  

Yeah. Thanks for calling it that. Expertise or obsession, we don't know. Guys, have a great week. We'll talk to you in two weeks.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai