Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Pete Jemian <[email protected]> · Mon, 13 Feb 2017 13:20:25 -0600

You have a velocity-controlled motor. Indeed, the VAL field of the

motor you show controls the motor velocity, not the position of the

motor. It is likely you are driving this motor's velocity from a DC

voltage proportional to the VAL field.

The EPICS motor record is intended to support positioning motors of all

kinds. (mea culpa: I just read the motor record documentation and

added the work "positioning" to the previous sentence.)

If you get an encoder (and encoder readout into EPICS) you could control

this motor+encoder system as a servo motor where the encoder provides

the positioning coordinate. There are servo controllers that integrate

these functions or you could do that with the EPICS epid record or ...

Pete

On 02/13/2017 01:01 PM, Joey Thai wrote:

Hi Tim,

I am also a student at the University of Washington working on the same
project as Matthew. We greatly appreciated your response and found it
consistent with the "Motor Record and related software" documentation
provided by this
website: http://www.aps.anl.gov/bcda/synApps/motor/R6-9/motorRecord.html

The problem we have is that the VAL field seems to change the speed of
the coreless brushed motor's rotation. The YouTube video below
demonstrates the speed of the motor when we set the VAL field to 100,
then 30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7BVMfGruQ

Notice that the speed of the motor when VAL is set to 30 is noticeable
slower than the speed when VAL is set to 100. Since the motor we are
using is not using an encoder, the motor does not know its current
position. As Matthew said earlier, VAL seems to affect the speed of the
motor's rotation.

I guess my question is, is there some sort of hidden relationship
between the VAL field and the speed of a motor's rotation?

Best Regards,
Joey Thai

On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 11:29 PM, Mooney, Tim M. <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

    Hi Matthew,

    The VAL field is the position you want the motor to move to.  You
    choose the units you want for the VAL field, and then you set the
    MRES (motor resolution) field to be the distance, in those units,
    that the motor will move when it's driver gets one step pulse. (You
    should also set the EGU field to some string that will tell the user
    what units you chose for the VAL field.  The EGU field isn't used
    for any other purpose.)

    Other background information: the motor's running speed (VELO) is in
    EGUs per second.  The motor's acceleration time (ACCL) is the number
    of seconds you want it to take for the motor to get from its base
    speed (VBAS) to its running speed (VELO). Stepper motors have a
    resonant speed that you want to avoid.  If you set VBAS to be higher
    than the resonant speed, the motor will leap immediately to the base
    speed, avoiding the resonance, and then accelerate from there to the
    running speed.  This is why short moves are slow, and longer moves
    are faster.

    Tim Mooney ([email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>)
    (630)252-5417 <tel:(630)%20252-5417>
    Beamline Controls Group (www.aps.anl.gov <http://www.aps.anl.gov>)
    Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    *From:* [email protected]
    <mailto:[email protected]>
    [[email protected]
    <mailto:[email protected]>] on behalf of Matt Dentinger
    [[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>]
    *Sent:* Saturday, February 11, 2017 8:52 PM
    *To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
    *Subject:* VAL field in Motor record Default unit

    Dear Tech-Talk,

       Hi, I am a student at the University of Washington and I am
    learning how to navigate and use EPICS programming.  For the task at
    hand I will not be able to use encoders, making use of absolute
    positioning impossible, so I was wondering what default unit the VAL
    field was in.  Through some testing it seems the larger the value,
    the faster the motor moves so I guessed that it might be a number
    that somehow represents revolutions per second (or another given
    time).  Hope you can shed some light on my issue.  Also, haven't
    subscribed yet, but I may have to depending on how this project
    continues.  Thanks again.

      Best,

         Matthew Dentinger

--
----------------------------------------------------------
 Pete R. Jemian, Ph.D.                <[email protected]>
 Beam line Controls and Data Acquisition, Group Leader
 Advanced Photon Source,   Argonne National Laboratory
 Argonne, IL  60439                   630 - 252 - 3189
-----------------------------------------------------------
    Education is the one thing for which people
       are willing to pay yet not receive.
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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System