Products >> LinkMotion for Scanlab Galvo and Laser Control Boards

What Is It?

LinkMotion is a revolutionary new product from Solustan, which guarantees to save you time and money. LinkMotion is a 32 bit driver compatible with Microsoft Windows XP. Once set and initialized, LinkMotion hides in the background just like a regular printer driver.

Scanlab AG of Germany (www.scanlab.de) builds galvo and laser control boards in various form factors. The products are proven and reliable. These products are well known for marking applications throughout the world.

Scanlab supplies a complete library of routines that can be embedded into your customized application for controlling the behavior of the laser power source and galvo based scanhead interfaced to the RTC series controller board.

How Does It Work?

Writing a customized application may mean one or more of the following:

• It could become a big and an expensive project
• If the project was not developed in-house, it might be difficult to manage, control, and enhance the features of the application.
• Continuous development is necessary to add features, functions, and bug fixes.
• Competitive pressures and technology advancements require continuous efforts and funds for the software development.
• Could become a drain on company's profitability.
• Software support has always been a cost center, never a profit center.

So, why write a customized application? Do what you do the best - build machines. Wouldn't it be great to use proven motion control boards and let your customers use powerful, off-the-shelf applications to control your machines.

Solustan's LinkMotion eliminates the need for customized application development for many of the motion control applications.

LinkMotion looks and feels like a printer driver within the PC/Windows architecture. Actually, it is a machine driver. It allows the user to design the job

How does a driver help you? For a simple example think about how your printer works. It doesn't matter what application you are using on your computer, you can always print to your printer. Whether its from your text editor, your web browser, your email program, or virtually any other application, you can always send documents out to your printer. This is because you have installed a 'driver' for your printer, that all programs can utilize. Shouldn't everything be this easy? Now, with Solustan's LinkMotion technology, it is.

You no longer have to worry about learning to use yet another piece of software. Are you comfortable with Corel DRAW, or perhaps a well-known CAD program? Wherever you are comfortable creating your designs, your work ends there. LinkMotion works with virtually any design program, so you can output your job straight from there!

What's the bottom line? LinkMotion works seamlessly in the background; you have no learning curve. Install the software and an off-the-shelf amplifier, and you're ready for production! Here's a list of just a few of the benefits you'll enjoy with LinkMotion.

Benefits

Upgrading features of the driver is as easy as installing the latest version of LinkMotion driver software on your PC.

Older machines can be upgraded with Microsoft Windows' graphical interface and plethora of advantages can be had for your business. All of this is yours for a fraction of the cost of acquiring a new machine.

Many successful marking businesses own more than one marking machine from more than one system supplier. LinkMotion drives most of the older and newer marking machines. You simply need to learn your favorite graphic design software. This job can be processed on any one of your laser marking machine.

Specialized single line and multiline marking fonts are offered optionally to perform fast and cost effective jobs.

LinkMotion works with clip arts, logos, AutoCAD, and graphics programs like Corel Draw! for marking with the greatest of ease.

Preset but expandable materials menu, positioning of a job with the help of a red, indicator diode, keyboard controls for axis moves, acceleration/deceleration setup and controls are provided.

Features

Boards Supported
RTC3
RTC4
RTC Scanalone
(Please, check with Scanlab for the compatibility for the older boards)

Galvo Board Specific User Configurable Settings
Laser type: CO2, YAG mode 1, YAG mode 2. YAG mode 3
Q-switch cycle period
Q-switch pulse width
First pulse suppression length
Laser-on delay
Laser-off delay
Laser-off power reduction percentage
Jump delay
Mark delay
Polygon delay
Reverse X
Reverse Y
Swap XY
Image field size
Wobble mode (enable/disable, line width, frequency)
Trace job-outline mode (enable/disable)
Wait for external start-job signal
Start-job pause length

General User-Configurable Settings
Mark speed
Jump speed
Color/pen-based power and mark-speed settings
Display in inches, cm, or mm

Additional Available Features
0, 0, 0 counter position reset
Real-time X,Y,Z position information (control-pad applet pops up in foreground during a job execution)
"Print" from application using Windows printer-driver architecture
Vector-mode only
Job pause, resume, and cancel
Independent Z axis jog (User settable steps per second and Z direction)
Job control signals (via laser extension connector)
Job busy (active high signal while a job is in progress)
End-of-job (100 ms pulse at the end of job)
Demo mode