SoftMotion Replacement

[Yetti77]

Hello,

What are people using to replace SoftMotion, and the C series Drive Modules, or Drive Interface Modules?  I am spec'ing out a system that must control a Yaskawa Sigma 7 series servo, and in the past I would have done it with SoftMotion Lite, and an NI Drive Module, or Drive interface module (most likely an interface module in this particular case).  What are some solutions now that it looks like NI is/has phased these out.

Thank you,

Chris

[BertMcMahan]

I quite like the Galil motion controllers. Their support staff is very helpful as well. It'll somewhat depend on exactly what application you need to use, but your best bet is to just move your motion control entirely to another device and communicate with it via serial/ethernet/etc.

You could certainly spin your own controller up using the FPGA and a cRIO, but that's going to be a LOT of work to reinvent the wheel. Unless you need something super specialized I'd just recommend getting an off-the-shelf controller.

Maxon also has some controllers that might be worth considering.

[Kyle97330]

I've got zero experience with Yaskawa beyond doing a Google search, but could you use one of these:

https://www.yaskawa.com/products/motion/sigma-7-servo-products/servopacks/sigmalogic7-modbus

LabVIEW has like 3 or 4 free MODBUS libraries already, so all you'd have to do would be the fine details of implementing said libraries.

[santo_13]

This is a good alternative - https://geco-lv.com/geco-motion.html

[Yetti77]

I much prefer the idea of an OTS solution than reinventing the wheel.  I am looking at several of the very good suggestions, and thankfully don't have to decide on the whole architecture today.