Presto Robot Controller
EtherCat based robot and motion controller that supports controlling up to 10 robots and thousand IOs simultaneously.
I'm Tuan Dang
A software developer and researcher
Wireless and Sensor Systems Lab
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Texas at Arlington, USA
My work almost relates to designing and implementing emdedded system for applications in automation and networking domain. My favorite programming languages are C/C++ because of their speed and extremely small memory footprint. Therefore, programs that are written in C/C++ can run with determined behavivor on very low-end mirocontroller (CPU: 1MHz-100MHz, Memory: 16KB~1MB).
My previous job is involved in many projects that are almost related to robot and motion controller. Motion control algorithm is an essential element of the controller, but a motion control algorithm alone is not enough for the system to work. There are several elements such as real-time Operating System (Linux RT, Xenomai, TI SYS/BIOS, VxWorks, ), real-time network (EtherCat, sample time 250us, jitter 1~2us, support more than 10,000 IO devices and 64 axes), and an interpreter that plays a role as a commander who centralized controls of all connected IO and axes.
To make the controller easy to use for end users, we also created a GUI program for PC, Teaching Pendant 3.5 inches (ARM Cortex m3, RS-232, low-cost), Teach Pendant 7 inches (TI AM335x, Ethernet, RS-232, Oscilloscope, 3D View support). In order to implement these system, I luckily work on PCB design, Embedded programming (C, C++, Qt), PC programming (WPF, C#), Human Machine Interface (HMI, Modbus TCP/IP, Modbus RTU, Pro-face, Weintek).
