Pro-100
Our new Pro-100 has been designed specifically with industrial applications in mind. It’s a little brother to the Pro-160, just as clever but not quite as strong.
Changing Frequency
A slightly unusual project today …. We’re working with a company developing a novel electrochemical cell for producing hydrogen and they asked if we could increase the frequency of the PWM output. It’s not something we’ve done before [we’re usually asked if we can slow it down], but we took on the challenge and found that we could. It throws up some interesting problems around the various timing loops within the software but we’ve tripled it to 60kHz fairly easily and it looks like 200kHz is on the cards.
Plant Watering Robot
The guys at Team Sprayers built this laboratory robot for applying water / fertiliser to plants over 20 years ago. The old RS motor controller is obsolete now so they asked us if we could re-create the control system for them. We used one of our Pro-160s set up for push button operation, wired in some limit switches, and tweaked a few settings – job done!
Hydraulic Pump Control
The guys from Osbit and Hyserve brought this heavy-duty test rig into our workshop. We’re helping them develop a hydraulic pump control system, this is using a 5kW series wound motor to drive the pump which will be used in an off-shore application. They need to be able to limit the system pressure by using a hall sensor to detect and limit the motor speed. We’re using one of our Pro-360-HCs which has a hall input. Initially the sensor gave strange readings but we tracked this down to the hex heads of the bolts being used to trigger it. 5 minutes with a hacksaw and the system was running smoothly.
Seed Spreader
Tom from Tramline Tec came to us with an interesting project to upgrade the torque of an automated seed or fertilizer spreader. He had integrated high accuracy GPS with some clever software to control and map application rates for seeds and fertilizers at a very precise level across a field. The problem was that the output of the logic unit was not strong enough to drive the rather chunky motor attached to the spreader particularly with some of the larger seeds envisaged. We created a small custom PCB to provide a voltage divider / low pass filter for his output signal and then fed that into one of our Porter 10 controllers.
Here it is in action…..
Pro-100 / 160 / 360 Remote Display Box
This Pro-100 / 160 / 360 remote display box allows the display to be mounted separately from the controller itself for more convenient viewing. It has a keypad to make profile changes and access the advanced functions without needing to access the controller itself.
Double Heading / RC Board
This double heading board lets one hand control [potentiometer] or radio control receiver operate two independent motor controllers. Designed to allow easy plug and play implementation of double-heading aka multi-unit [MU] operation. It can also be used as a convenient way to switch between wired and RC control of a single DNO / Pro-120 / 150 controller.
![Double heading [or MU] board.](https://www.4qd.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/DHB-202-2-500x450.jpg)
Magnetic Kill Switch Launched
We wanted a magnetic kill switch that could be used as a safety cut-off device for our controllers, we couldn’t find anything suitable so decided to make our own.
It’s available here.
How to test an electric motor.
Over the years we’ve seen a number of controllers that have been damaged by faults in the motor they are driving, so we thought we’d make a short video showing how to test an electric motor for short circuit and open circuit windings.
Train Mountain 2022 Triennial
The Train Mountain triennial in Oregon, USA is back and Steve will be there from 21-24th June 2022 and demonstrating 4QD products. Please do call by the stand in the vendor area for a chat. His cell phone number while in the US will be +44 745 335 1325.