Allen bradley ultra drive 100

[Chris Elston 78]

I have an Ultra Drive 100 application. It's a pin dereeling machine. I have a photo eye that I use on the pins to home my Ultra drive, so basically it homes to the centerlines of the NON dereeled pins. Then after home, I index the motor to each pin center lines. Of course using the index function in the ultra drive, after about ten hours of running, I get the increamental error, because the ultra drive is told to index to the position that it was last at by the value I told it to move. But my question is, since my homing photoeye sees the centerline of every pin anyway, could I change the mode from indexed mode to registered mode? How does that work? My understanding is everytime the photoeye is seen, or in my case the centerline of the pins, will the motor stop? Let me try and explain. 0 to 1000 pulses is my index. 0 to 1000 pulses is my so called pin centerline if I change to registered mode, Let's say at 0 to 980 pulses, my photoeye comes on, at position 980 from the encoder, while in registered mode, will the motor STOP at 980 instead of finishing the 1000 pulse move because it saw the registered mark first? Maybe I understand this because I never used a servo with registered marks before like a cartoning or paper printing machine.... How will the motor react over a time period?

[Guest Dan Maynard]

Is this question still outstanding, or did you solve it another way? I have used these drives a few times but only just found this forum. The simple answer is yes, registration moves would be a good way to solve the problem. You program the registration move distance, which is the distance it will move to stop after being triggered by the sensor. In your case, you need the sensor to trigger at say 900 pulses, and a registration distance of 100, so you might have to move the sensor forward a bit. It is not possible with registration moves to have the drive stop at the point the sensor triggers, as it has to ramp the velocity down to stop. If you still have a questions then email me at danmaynard@innomech.co.uk

[Chris Elston 78]

Dan, I ended up figuring out this registered mode, but it's been a few months back so I can't recall what I actually did. But for sure like you said. Registered mode worked the best. I ran it myself for 8 hours, and the Ultra drive never missed a centerline after that change. I also had the mech eng. dude change the gear box from a 10:1 to a 50:1 because speed was not an issue. I am assuming that also helped solve the problem times 5, because any errors I was getting was cut by a factor of 5 when I got a new gear box. Thanks for responding. Please register and stick around a bit. You might catch up with Chris B, he is from the UK too.