5) Curiousity about the lack of knowledge at AB, do they actually build this module or is it just built for AB by a real motion control company like Delta or someone?

I think you hit it squarely there. Peter Nachtwey has admitted doing design for the -HYD02 and the -M02 motion control cards for ControlLogix. I don't know who does the actual construction or whether Peter or his company have on-going involvement, i.e. with firmware updates.

My experience with auto-tune (with servo motors - no experience with hydraulics) is that the resulting gains are typically too high, roughly in proportion to the inertia mis-match in the system.

On this product, however the lack of knowledge in AB's tech support is austonding.

We ended up calling in an outside controls company for help with the tuning. They did an excellent job,

sometimes the autotune works but the numbers it comes up with are garbage and it does not work well at all.

The last time i had to do a tune i did the autotune (on only one axis) and both axes were suddenly totally out of control. I downloaded the program from before the tune with the gains and it was still totally out of control. Someone suggested cycling power on the PLC. I have been doing this long enough to know that should never fix a problem but i was desperate. As soon as it powered back up everything was fine. That makes me very nervous about the reliability of this PLC and motion control module.

Here are my questions:
1) Do you find the HYD-02 and Control Logix motion to be reliable and rock solid, like other motion controllers are?

2) Does the autotune work?

a) when everything mechanically is in perfect shape?

b) if the mechanical is not in totally perfect shape

3) Should the results of the autotune be good, just autotune and go?

4) I am at Major rev 15 on everything, are there any improvements (or bug fixes) in V 16

5) Curiousity about the lack of knowledge at AB, do they actually build this module or is it just built for AB by a real motion control company like Delta or someone?

My experience with auto-tune (with servo motors - no experience with hydraulics) is that the resulting gains are typically too high, roughly in proportion to the inertia mis-match in the system.

OK, I found the thread. Why didn't some PM me to let me know.
However, I am not really sure how Rockwell does its auto tuning. They haven't shared that information with us.


This is too bad. One of the reasons we wanted to make the HYD02 and M02AS similar to the M02AE is so that if you know one you know the others. It is much easier to support 3 nearly identical modules.

More about this later.


Who? We are always looking for integrators that have experience in hydraulic servo motion.

* Concept Systems. Ed Diehl came up and he impressed the hell out of me. Another good one is Jeff Ralph, but since you come from USNR you probably know him already.


There are cases when the auto tune will not work at all. Usually this is due to poor hydraulic design. Valves with over lapped spool and non linear valves such as the Bosch NG valves with nic spools are the main culprits. We have a Bosch NG10 but is has a linear spool. If the systems is designed well the auto tuning will work. We have tested it at Delta.

* Valves are Bosch 0 811 404 803, G Series temposonic probes (start/stop). The cylinders are around 4" bore and around 30" stroke. I believe they are regen cylinders.


OK, what kind of system is it? I know saw mill systems very well as our first hydraulic controllers were called set works back in the lat 1970s and early 1980s. I worked for USNR from late 1980 to 1985.
Tuning a edger should be easy. Vertically mounted cylinders can be much tougher. So what exactly are you trying to do?

* It is a 2 Knee Headrig carriage. Blocks sawn on this carriage are 7" - 35" (rarely) diameter and 8' - 12' length. Most of the particulars of the hydraulic system are in my last response. Also there is a 15 gal. and a 5 gal. accumulator on the carriage. I Believe te flow on the pump is approx. 30 Gpm


The HYD02 is a very good controller and should be able to do what you want to do in a saw mill. Newnes standardized on the HYD02 and M02AS.

* I knew that before we started using them, i figured if they could make it work so could we. I saw at the show this year that Digitron is actually selling HYD-02 based setworks now. Allen Bradley seems to be kind of the Microsoft of controls. Everyone has to use them ... because everyone uses them.


it does on our system which is designed pretty well. It is realitively stiff and linear. I can think of lots of cases that can screw up any auto tuning system. We have only tested it on horizontal systems because that is all we have.


It should if the system is linear.


doubtful. More details are needed.


Ideally yes. Often the auto tune well just get you close and you must tweak the gains to get the desired response. That is true for most auto tuning systems. I wrote the auto tuning system for our controllers. Most of the time they work quite well, but sometime they don't or can't because of the system. We have back up procedure for that.

The auto tuning for the HYD02, M02AE and M02AS is actually done in the Control Logix or RS5000 software. All I know is that a few points of information are return to the PLC. I don't even know if Rockwell has special tuning algorithms for hydraulic versus motors.

* When they were trying to help us with this, the people i was woking with in tech only had motors. They were not able to recreate a lot of the same issues. Maybe it is the same algorithm.


I don't know. If I had seen this post on Friday I could have asked the engineer that designed these cards and is managing the product. I don't think there have been any major changes since V13. I know that a lot of the changes in V10-V13 were due to the motion control and having to support new parameters.


The last part gave me a chuckle.
Delta Computer Systems builds and test the modules. We have automated testing equipment and a thermal shock test. Each card is tested, logged and given a serial number.
We started with M02AE software and modified it so the HYD02 would work properly controlling hydraulics. I did the initial modifications. Since the module has been in production our Rockwell project engineer and designer has made whatever small tweaks that have been necessary.


That is because most companies have auto tuning as a selling feature. It may only work in theory. A good auto tuning system shouldn't do that get the gains too high. I can explain all about auto tuning but someone should start a different thread for that. Our auto tuning works in voltage or torque modes as well as hydraulics. You know I am a little more fanatical about getting auto tuning right than the average marketing guy that just wants auto tuning to say he has it.

One of the advantages of buying our controller is the support and 'tribal' knowledge we have. We have been at this for a long time. Two of our three tech support people have been at this for 20+ years.
For me it is 25+ years. Our engineers 8 and 15 years. We have extremely low turn over and this is what we do. cussenrp, we can tune up our controllers over the interent. Sometimes it is much faster to do this than explain how to tune a PID. We have classes too.

I have heard about your classes. Unfortunately i don't need classes for your products.

We retrofitted a stacker at one of our mills to use motion control on the stacking forks. It originally had 2 valves for each direction (fast - slow) and a bunch of proxes. We used an RMC 100-M1-ENET. I think it took about 3 hour for startup and i have not thought about it since.

Also used a Delta VME card in a GE 90-70 rack (don't remember the model) to build a setworks for an old edger that a previous company had bought at an auction. Because of these expierences i thought i knew somehing about motion control. I think you guys just make it too easy.

Thanks