If you have IndraDrive MI units you should be daisy chaining your drives together to save money by cutting wiring costs, reducing cabinet space to a minimum, and speeding up installation and cable maintenance for your servo motors and drives. If you’re not daisy chaining your equipment and it’s capable of it, you’re wasting money.
Daisy chaining as a technique gets its name from making chains of, well you guessed it, daisies. A pastime of children in less technologically driven times, daisy chains are made by creating a hole in one stem and threading the next daisy’s stem through the hole, continuing the process to make a chain. The heads of the daisies prevent the flower from slipping through. The result looks like the daisies are on one stem but they’re actually interconnected stems from one to the next. The same technique is applied to IndraDrive MI units where one cable goes from the drive to the first servo, then a new cable from that servo to the next.
Up to 20 IndraDrive MI units can be connected together using string of cables instead of 20 separate cables that all feed back to the drive. In other words, instead of 20 cables that get increasing lengthy and expensive that use up massive amounts of space for connections at the servo drive and for cabling, you have essentially one long cable that’s only interrupted by the next IndraDrive MI unit. One long cable between 20 units takes up as much space as one cable to the 20th unit with non-daisy chaining drives.
If you have IndraDrive MI units but have a ton of cabling, your system might not be taking full advantage of daisy chaining to streamline your servos.