Productivity AMC: Hardware Axis Configuration at AutomationDirect

To configure your AMC axis, have your unit added to the hardware configuration in the Productivity Suite and then select your AMC unit. There is a quick start video that will walk through adding the AMC unit to your Productivity PLC and a link to that can be found in the description below. The AMC configuration is broken into two parts. Setup for your overall unit and then the individual axis setups. To save yourself some time in setting this up, I would advise using the structure feature. This will create the tags that will be needed for the complete setup of the axis, and you will just need to load values into those tags. Here you can define if the PLC Program will continue to run or go into stop mode if there is a communication loss to the AMC unit. This, if enabled, allows an outside device to enable or disable the entire controller by requiring this input to be true. Here are some status flags for the AMC unit. Now let’s look at a single axis configuration. Each axis is broken into 4 parts. For status this allows you to map all the input and output points to a tag, if you use the structure option this is all mapped to tags for you. These will provide the current position and speed based upon the scaling, which will be set up in the next tab. And this will give you the possible error codes for this individual axis. Here you have 3 options. You can leave the position in pulse which will not apply any scaling to the current position or you can define how many pulses it takes to equal one of these options and if needed you can define a custom reference. So, for instance, let’s say it takes 360 pulses to move my application one inch. This is based upon your actual output not your encoder. That encoder feedback is defined below. Here you can define the data type your position data will be stored in. If you select an integer, this will be in whole numbers only. If you select float, you can have fractional values and you can define the accuracy here. This time unit is used to calculate the axis speed. You can select this based upon these options or make a custom reference. When you enable the encoder for feedback to your motion - let's say it takes 720 pulses on my encoder to move my motion 1 inch. So, based upon my position setup above, I would have two encoder pulses per 1 output pulse. Here you can use that encoder to allow the AMC to monitor the deviation of your output to your encoder feedback. If there is a deviation, here you can define the max deviation, and how the unit will react if you reach that max deviation. This option allows you to use the axis enable instruction before you can run motion instructions. This will also define whether or not the Enable Output 2 is required to be active before a move command is sent to the axis. This output is used if your motor controller requires an external enable. And if this is enabled then this will define if the axis enable output will remain at the last state during a stop mode on the PLC This will define if the at rest output is used for a given axis. If this is selected as Yes, this will automatically operate during the start and stop of a move. This defines whether or not the Drive Ready Enable is being used for a given axis. This is useful if you want to bring your drive ready signal from your motor controller to the AMC for handshaking ensuring that your downstream device is ready to receive motion commands. If the signal goes low at any point during the operation, then you will have these actions. These are used to invert the signal of motor direction and various inputs. This allows you to define the input and edge that when true will reset the position of the axis to this defined position. Here you can define if the motion is rotary or linear. If this is selected, it defines the motion as rotary. So, if the pulses get to this value the position will reset to 0 pulses. And these are your output limits for velocity, acceleration, and deacceleration. Once you have all of this set up just send it to your PLC. They have really done a great job making this as simple as possible. Productivity suppling the tools to get the most out of your control system. If you have any questions on the Productivity line of PLCs, please feel free to comment below or call into our technical support department. Click here to see more videos on the Productivity line of PLCs and click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel for new products and solutions.