PI Physik Instrumente: For our anniversary, a wealth of new solutions for you

What better way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of PI's marriage with miCos than to announce a host of popular miCos stages newly compatible with PI's cost-effective and easy-to-use Mercury DC servo - and stepper-motor controllers?

This development brings the write-once benefits of PI's General Command Set (GCS) to the burgeoning world of miCos' superb linear and rotary stages. GCS is the command set used across PI's modern product line of motion, nanopositioning and hexapod controllers, and it allows code built for one PI model to be used alongside or ported readily to other controller and stage models. In addition,

Initial setup is greatly facilitated by automatic configuration of standard parameters based on an extensive database indexed by stage model numbers, while custom parameters remain easy to implement in non-volatile form.
PI's standard tuning and diagnostic tools are supported out of the box. This makes customization straightforward and safe.
Your productivity will benefit from PI's extensive and well-documented support for programming environments as diverse as LabVIEW, MATLAB and textual languages like C and VisualBasic. Rich and well-supported options for Linux as well as Windows are also offered as part of the Mercury's standard feature-set.

Since many applications involve a variety of motion form-factors, having a single programming platform to deal with and a single global support resource to rely upon has proven to be highly beneficial to our customers. And since software is the face of instrumentation when architecting an application and as well as in everyday use, having a consistent, well-wrung-out set of development and support tools is increasingly important. So we think this is big news-- and good news, especially for anyone contemplating a complex application, or one that might need to scale.

The Mercury controllers deserve a special spotlight of their own. Highly popular for their combination of performance and value, they feature responsive RS-232 and USB interfaces for snappy communications, with built-in networking for painlessly creating multi-axis configurations.

C-663 supports stepper motor stages while C-863 supports DC servo-motor stages. Each features a bank of programmable TTL lines that let you trigger motion or trigger external equipment or processes, and you can easily configure them via a single GCS command to provide deterministic, real-time position increment indication or instantaneous in-motion/on-target status. The Mercury controllers' integrated amplifiers support mechanisms with surprisingly powerful motors while also providing compatibility with our stages featuring onboard ActiveDrive™ amplifiers.

PI miCos stages newly compatible with C-663 and C-863 include: