An exciting capability of the SST servo drives is their ability to solve nearly all motion control problems using a "soft motion control" technique that can be implemented on your control CPU, essentially at zero cost, using existing I/O lines (a spare parallel printer port, etc.) with little CPU overhead. This technique takes advantage of the SSt servo drive's Regressive Auto Spline feature to make it easy for your CPU to generate high-resolution move trajectories. The MoveDone feature, Limit Switch and Hard stop home positioning features, and Torque fold-back modes also support this technique by removing the need for encoder feedback in most applications. For a complete application note that describes and benchmarks this exciting technique, download:

A Zero-Cost Motion Controller v1.7 [PDF] 381KB

As well as a detailed explanation, you’ll find timing diagrams, C source code, flowcharts and actual test results for popular Intel processors.

New, just released- Zero Cost Controller application that runs on a PC, equivalent to a 4-axis motion control card. This self extracting ZIP file includes ZCC.EXE, a DOS command line application that allows you to immediately evaluate this technique. Full source code in C is provided for the ZCC application including, PC interrupt initialization and handling routines, trajectory generation and multi-axis management. C source code is also supplied for the underlying application interface (API) that can be used as a library to quickly build custom multi-axis motion control applications. All these source files are easily portable to other CPUs and operating systems.

ZCC Application & Source [EXE, Self Extracting] 130KB
ZCC Application & Source [ZIP] 130KB