Motion control has always been an essential component of the TwinCAT automation software by Beckhoff and is successfully used in many projects across all industries. All the features of the previous TwinCAT NC2 motion control solutions are also present in this new generation. In addition, TwinCAT MC3 can be operated in parallel with NC2 and MC3 axes can be coupled to existing NC2 axes. This means that new machine components can be implemented with TwinCAT MC3 without having to adapt existing machine components. TwinCAT MC3 brings numerous new advantages for motion control thanks to its new modular architecture. These include multi-core and multi-task support in particular. In addition, there is no fixed restriction on the number of axes.
Different axes cycle times in one core
TwinCAT MC3 can be distributed to several CPU cores which allows movement to be synchronized across all cores. Furthermore, axes can be operated on the same CPU core at different cycle times, depending on their speed and function. The CPU core is thus utilized optimally, since the fastest axis no longer sets the rate for all axes.
