Yaskawa America Inc. recently released Yaskawa Compass, a graphical user interface tool for advanced manufacturing. The software package can benefit multiple applications in 3D printing, shape cutting, machine tool and robotics, said the Waukegan, Ill.-based Drives & Motion unit of Yaskawa America.
Yaskawa’s Drives & Motion division manufactures industrial automation equipment, including low- and medium-voltage variable-speed drives, servo motors and amplifiers, machine controllers, spindle drives and motors, and low-voltage industrial switch products. The company’s Motoman Robotics division makes robots to weld, assemble, cut and handle goods for manufacturers. Yaskawa America employs more than 1,000 people across the U.S.
“Compass is designed with creativity in mind, allowing machine manufactures to brand and easily customize screens to include core machine attributes and customer needs with little programming requirements,” stated Rosemary Burns, the company’s Advanced Manufacturing Segment manager.
Yaskawa Compass features
Coupled with the MP3300iec motion controller, the CNC “navigator” provides advanced plug-in solutions that users can simply drop onto their screens, said Yaskawa. Prebuilt plug-ins include extruder, spindle, temperature control, stepper control, linear and rotary tool changer, 2D path planning, and more. All plug-ins are developed in C#, so machine builders can also easily create and import their own machine plug-ins, the company said.
Yaskawa Compass also includes the following:
- Landscape or portrait mode
- Machine configurator
- Screen configurator
- Prebuilt plugins
- OEMs branding with company colors and graphics
- Axis configurator
- Auto, MDI (manual data input), and manual mode
- Pop-up NC editor and messaging
- Alarm history
- Tool manager
- Part cycle time measurement tools
- 2D viewer with live TCP updates
To supplement the use of Compass with MPiec controllers, Yaskawa has added advanced motion control features to its MotionWorks IEC library. Some of these include bed leveling compensation, extruder pressure advance control, tangential control and ability to create custom G-codes and kinematics.
“Consider hybrid machinery — Yaskawa Compass empowers machine manufacturers with versatility for both additive and subtractive applications to easily implement and customize features while streamlining their development cycle,” added Burns.
I was very impressed at first. After a while I was under impression that this only runs on Windows. This is extremely primitive lock in to OS that’s inherently insecure, it’s not used much in data centers, tablets, etc. What about Android in combination with 5G?
Real engineers used Unix in 80’s and 90’s. Unix on HP, SGI, Silicon graphics, and other high performance computer until primitive PC architecture took over because it was CHEAP.
We have free and very well supported Linux distributions that are way ahead of other OS in real or virtual environments.
In addition, G-code must DIE! Using this way outdated “code” is like writing computer commands in Intel 8080 assembly code. G-code made sense when programs were stored on paper tape but this is 2020 with GB size SSD cards. Do I have ideas what to replace G-code with? Yes I do.
In any case, we are dealing with physics, math, material science and nobody (some industrial consortium) came up with new programing standard that’s easy to remember, makes logical sense, it’s adaptable for robotics, etc. Pathetic!