Monthly Archives: April 2021

Incremental Encoders need loving care

Incremental encoders in Rexroth or Indramat equipment come in a variety of shapes and sizes but they all share one trait: a piece of glass is where the encoding, or directions for the machine, are written. The benefits of these pieces of glass are that highly accurate encoding can be applied and they won’t wear… Read more »

Walmart lays off more robots

For many industrialists, the pandemic was like falling asleep in 2020 and waking up in 2030 — except it was actually still 2020. The pandemic pushed automation ahead ten years beyond where it had been expected to end up in the second decade of the 21st century, forcing manufacturers, brands, and consumers alike to accept… Read more »

Rexroth REMAN

rexroth reman

REMAN — sounds like a superhero, right? It might feel like a superhero, too, when you need to extend the life of your legacy Rexroth components. Reman is short for remanufacture. That’s when Rexroth takes an old part at the factory and completely rebuilds it. A repair gets anything that needs to be fixed, fixed…. Read more »

Don’t Ignore Errors

An error code that’s not really urgent keeps popping up. Instead of addressing it, you just keep going on about your day. It’s gotten to the point where you don’t even leave a note for the next shift to tell them the error popped up again today. It’s just expected. But what you should be… Read more »

Manuals Forever!

Another engineering blogger wrote this a while back: “Automation component suppliers should provide at least minimum support such as downloadable manuals… forever.” The writer points out that you can still buy legacy units on eBay (and here’s why you probably shouldn’t), not to mention the ones that are still running just fine in your factory,… Read more »

Giant Armed Robots

Donetsk, in the Ukraine, is sporting giant armed robots right now — on the other side of town from Russian tanks. They may be intimidating, but they’re not really war robots. Instead, they are the creations of workers at a local auto shop. With friends, they used leftover car parts and waste metal to build enormous… Read more »

Getting to Know the Indramat PPC Control

Indramat controls come in several different varieties; the PPC control is Sercos based. Sercos, serial real-time communication system, is a globally standardized system for communication between servos and controls. Sercos, the game-changer Tight communication among components is key to motion control, and sercos is known for providing that. Originally, servos and drives communicated with analog… Read more »

MDD Servomotors

  MDD motors are designed for high feed rates that require precision work. Printing, textile, and packaging machines often use MDD servomotors. Indramat’s MDD motors are commonly found in printing presses where the demands of high-speed printing are part of the routine. MDD motors are made to respond to high feed rates but aren’t the… Read more »

Where Will Robots Persist?

We’re hearing a lot about “getting back to normal,” but we’re also recognizing that there may be a new normal. Our future lives might not be the same as they were before the pandemic. One of the areas where that change could play out is in workplace automation. Robots took on a lot of jobs… Read more »

The Assembly Line

A century ago, Henry Ford’s assembly line revolutionized the way things were made. Until that time, objects were made individually. A craftsman would make one chair, start to finish, before moving on to the next chair. Using the assembly line concept, Henry Ford was able to take the 12.5 hours involved in building one car… Read more »