Beckhoff's 2019 Product Line

4 February, 2019

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Over the past 15 years, the question of higher Gigabit Ethernet has been on the backburner of Industrial Automation discussions because many thought a need for greater bandwidths was unnecessary. However, with their introduction of new EtherCAT G technology, Beckhoff has redefined the glass ceiling for both Operational and Information technologies. The all new EtherCAT G is capable of exceeding Ethernet speeds unfathomable in the past years. It was specifically built by Beckhoff for heavy data and information driven automation lines which require compatibility with and increased performance to older 100 Mbit/s systems.

The EtherCAT G has a simple fail-safe of sorts, making it revert to traditional 100 Mbit/s slave speeds for the original EtherCAT system. The true purpose for the creating the EtherCAT G system is for parallel use with 100Mbit/s settings on old systems and up to 1Gbit/s of new network transmissions. Beckhoff has found a way to integrate dated or growing large-scale operations which need the ability to transmit more data and information at higher speeds. This means automation such as quantity and measurement reading equipment, motion cameras, and motion machines have any even higher capacity to read, process, and transfer data.

Last year at PACKEXPO 2018, Beckhoff made a huge splash by introducing the EtherCAT G and an all new compact design embedded CX7000 PC series. The CX7000 tailors itself to less complex entry automation systems while still offering a higher than average amount of functionalities for control. Its biggest feature is a 32 bit ARM Cortex-M& processor, allowing users superior control for an exceptional price. All CX7000 series drives are very modular and small in design making them a perfect fit for moving sorting systems or processing belts. There are a total of 8 ingoing connections and 4 outgoing connections carrying a total of 24VDC each. The formal software installed on CX7000 drives is Beckhoff’s patented TwinCAT 3 software which is able to run down to -25 Celsius and up to +60 Celsius.

Beckhoff also expanded their product line with the material transport systems XPlanar. The systems works by using square-cut platforms which magnetically float above sets of permanently integrated magnets. The tiles can move up to 4m/s and can be configured in any desirable format by the end-user.  The Planar tiles can be switched out depending on the payload. Payloads can go up to 6Kg if the tiles are configured accordingly. The tiles can be tilted up to 5 degrees and rotated 360 degrees above all XPlanar tiles.

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