Dan McCarthy: [00:00:06] Welcome everyone to another episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, where we talk about how automation trends and technologies are shaping industry, logistics, and other sectors of the global economy. I’m Dan McCarthy of Tech B2B Marketing, and joining me today are my colleague John Lewis. Say hi John.

John Lewis: [00:00:23] Hi Dan. How’s it going everyone?

Dan McCarthy: [00:00:27] Also joining us is Patrick McFadden, CEO and co-founder of Iris Dynamics. Welcome to the podcast, Patrick. Thanks for joining us today.

Patrick McFadden: [00:00:35] Absolutely. Thanks Dan and John. Great to meet you. And thank you for having me.

Dan McCarthy: [00:00:39] It’s our pleasure. So Patrick, let’s kick off by having you tell us a little bit more about Iris Dynamics. And you’re the co-founder. So a little bit about why and how you started it and what prompted that and where you are in the market today.

Patrick McFadden: [00:00:51] Yeah. Yeah. So I’m one of the co-founders, and we started the company quite a while ago actually at this point. Oddly enough, not from the manufacturing background. Initially, we came out of the aerospace sector, specifically building components for force feedback or control loading for commercial simulation devices, and that’s sort of where the core technology was developed. And then over many years, it sort of got dragged kicking and screaming into the robotics sector and now into the automation sector. And that’s sort of where we are now.

Dan McCarthy: [00:01:26] And we were talking a little bit before we kicked off here that your first product was a flight control simulator yoke.

Patrick McFadden: [00:01:34] Yeah, yeah. So we were basically a subcomponent in commercial simulation systems. “Force feedback” is probably the term most people are familiar with, but essentially it’s a back-drivable motor. So you apply a certain force command to it, it’ll output that regardless it’s being back-driven or not. And the important piece there is, at least in an aviation application, the amount of pressure that a pilot feels on their fingertips, on a yoke or a flight stick or a cyclic or whatever conveys very important information. And in a simulation environment, you need to be able to convey that information back to the pilot. That’s where the core piece of technology came out of.

Dan McCarthy: [00:02:15] That’s right. Everything’s evolved from there.

Patrick McFadden: [00:02:18] That’s correct. Yeah. Yeah.

John Lewis: [00:02:20] Patrick, in manufacturing, in terms of an existing labor shortage and increased use of automation, can you talk about some applications of direct linear drive technology for automating routine tasks and what the benefits are compared to using traditional drive systems?

Patrick McFadden: [00:02:40] Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it’s an interesting question because it’s a somewhat diverse list of benefits. I guess one of the things to sort of drill home with smart devices, which is one of the ways we’re basically describing this kind of device. They’re fully integrated, at least in our perspective. They’re fully integrated devices. So that means the motor driver itself, the stators, the motor controller, all the position sensing, and in our case force sensing is all fully baked into the motor. It’s one device that you don’t need to have quite as many cables going back to the cabinet on the other side of the room. Because of that, they’re much faster and easier to install. You don’t need to have nearly the same amount of engineering time spent to get these things up and running, because you have this fully integrated device and you have a lot of logic processing on board, you have the ability to measure and report force. You can use these devices in applications that, frankly, you really couldn’t use before. So some of the tasks that we’re finding right now in the manufacturing space, a lot of assembly tasks, so things like press fitting inserts and needing to make sure that you have the right distance as well as the right amount of force being applied during that process. You know, if you exceed some force threshold or some position number isn’t met, it can throw an alarm. Applications like driving and hammering rivets or other sorts of things like that, lots of applications where you might want to maintain a constant amount of pressure to something. And, again, because it’s a compliant motor, back-drivable motor, so things like rolling mills and that kind of thing. You have like a drag knife or you’ve got like a sensor that you need to have being constantly pressed against something and maybe thickness of the material is varying. Lots of applications where you’re synchronizing movement. Honestly in the manufacturing space, if you wanted to have an application where you have some amount of force control, the most practical way to do that right now is basically with pneumatics. You can adjust the amount of pressure in your system, and that’s how you can make them work, and that works great to a point. But as the seals wear out, as they get stiff, your calibration gets to go out of whack eventually. And if you’ve got an application where you might have to have a number of motors firing, synchronized, but with a certain amount of force, that can be a problem. And so we’re finding a lot of applications in those sorts of spaces too: fixturing, work-holding, and that sort of thing.

John Lewis: [00:05:27] Yeah. Just a quick follow-up on that. You talked a little bit about making these systems smart and how that expands or influences how the motors are applied. Can you talk about how smart should these motors be?

Patrick McFadden: [00:05:44] Yeah. It’s a good question. So, again, as I mentioned, smart motor in our definition here is again fully integrated. So you’ve got all the electronics that are needed to make it work living directly on the motor. So you’re not going off and buying separate motor drivers. You’re not buying separate VFD. You’re not necessarily buying a separate motor or a separate control device, as well as obviously all the sensors and all that are all fully integrated. And the advantages of doing that.   Obviously all the integration stuff we sort of touched on already: less cabling, easier setup. You don’t have to mess around as much with calibrating everything because it’s already pre-done. But the other side of this equation is by moving the motor control, specifically all the control loops, like the PIDs and all that, locally to the motor, you can now have the motor do some kind of interesting things. Much faster response times and much lower latency. But, for example, if you wanted to measure changes in mechanical backlash, you could do that, because, again, you’ve got force data as well as position data all being processed locally, very, very quickly on the motor. And you can get into a lot of discussions about that. How smart it should be is a good question. One of the things that we found specifically with our customers in the robotics space is because we’ve been able to move so much of that overhead equipment, which is also point on footprint, but move that into the motor itself. You can offload a lot of the processing power that the main control device was having to do before. So now at this point the robot’s controller can say, okay, hey, I need you to perform an action. And then how that action gets performed can be dealt with directly on the motor itself.

Dan McCarthy: [00:07:42] So that involves logic obviously. Is it the logic component that you also provide or do you provide the software?

Patrick McFadden: [00:07:49] So yeah, for sure. So it’s all built into the motor itself. So it’s built into the motor’s firmware. And there’s a lot of different ways you can control it. You know, one of the interesting things we found at our last Automate show, actually, was a lot of people wanted the functionality of these higher-level controls that I’m going to talk about in a minute, but they didn’t necessarily want to have to get deep into the weeds of integrating it and programming it. And a lot of these folks now are just using very simple digital or analog triggers to then have the motor itself do some really complicated things, which means they don’t have to write a line of code, but they can still get the functionality I’m going to talk about. So, again, having this integrated force control feature, again without the need for external load cells or external encoders, and some interesting black box stuff on how we’re pulling that off, you can have a number of different control modes operating locally, fully on board the motor. So things like force mode. So it outputs a constant force. So tell it to output x number of Newtons, and it’ll do that regardless if it’s being back-driven forward or backwards. So applications like polishing and grinding, as I mentioned, like drag knives, rolling mills, that sort of application. Position mode is something everyone’s going to be familiar with, obviously. Go to position A. Go to position B. Straightforward. Obviously we can do that. Kinematics mode, which is the interesting one that we’ve been finding a lot of customers using. So, again, you can basically preprogram sets of profiles that you want the motor to do. And those can then be triggered from a simple digital signal. So, for example, if you’re doing a replacement of a pneumatic system, you can tell the motor, hey, I want you to do this motion profile just by plugging it into a laptop. A little simple free GUI that we have. You can program it. You don’t have to write any code. Hit save. And every time this digital line gets pulled high or low, it’ll do the thing. And then in this particular case, the cool thing with that is you can then wire that into the exact same solenoid control signal that you were previously using in your pneumatic system. Now this is going to be constantly performing the correct movement all the time, every time. And then the other one which is kind of interesting would be what we’re referring to as the haptics mode, where basically the motor acts as a programmable spring or programmable damper. It can simulate inertia. It can simulate mass, vibrations, whatever. And it can do these modes sort of stacked on top of each other. So this is sort of the functionalities that you can do with these devices.

Dan McCarthy: [00:10:21] Just another quick follow-up. Sorry, John, but I’m curious, is machine learning a possible addition to this technology?

Patrick McFadden: [00:10:30] Yeah, it’s a great question. Obviously, that comes up a fair bit in our conversations with people. Robots are obviously blind unless you add vision to them, and robots can’t feel unless you add more sensors to them. And of course you can do all those things, but they cost time. They cost money. You got to have cables. You got to have sensor amplifiers and image processors and all that nonsense. And if you need that, absolutely go off and do it. The advantage of using a smart motor or a smart device like what we’re offering, at least in the linear space, it allows you to have a lot more functionality without the need to have all of those additional sensors and all that additional overhead, both from install and from mechanical stuff. For example, let’s say you had a pneumatic line where it has a bunch of pneumatic systems, pneumatic motors doing things, and you want to throw some fancy machine learning at that, or you want it to do predictive maintenance or something like that. Well you probably don’t have position data on those motors. Probably only have a rough idea what the force data is.

Patrick McFadden: [00:11:46] You probably have the PSI of the system. You definitely don’t have a load cell on the end of every single pneumatic piston, and the advantage of using this sort of approach into an application like that is now all of a sudden, hey, you’ve got a ton of data available. Now the motors can deal with a bunch of that internally themselves. So they can make sure they’re adjusting and increasing or decreasing force to hit whatever it is that you need to do. So you can get better line speed, you can get better repeatability, all that jazz. But at the same point, if you are looking at integrating some of these higher-level things, say AI and machine learning and all that, the data is now available for you. So we aren’t looking at implementing AI systems or machine learning ourselves. We’re enabling. That’s the whole point. And again, that just comes with the beast of what we’re providing. The data is there. You can use it if you want to. You don’t have to. But it’s there should you decide you want to use it.

John Lewis: [00:12:48] Hey, Patrick, you talked a little bit about, a few times now about replacing pneumatic technology. And pneumatics is often used in advanced robotics. And I’m wondering, if and how is smart linear drive technology being used in advanced robotics? You know like to provide high-precision motion control, maybe in the end-of-arm tooling, maybe working with cobots or autonomous robots for doing different tasks like assembly, packaging, or machine tending?

Patrick McFadden: [00:13:21] Yeah, absolutely. Again, great questions. So a lot of applications, obviously, you might want to have some sort of force sensing, force control, specifically in cobot applications and end-of-arm tooling. And a few ways you can do it. It’s usually done, as I mentioned, with a load cell or some sort of force sensor. And of course, in those applications, it’s usually like the robot goes to a position and do not exceed a force. So it’s not necessarily back-drivable, not necessarily compliant. There are ways of doing that, but complicated and expensive and somewhat rare, to be honest, in manufacturing environments. Pneumatics, obviously easier to install, easier to use. But there’s problems. You don’t have data, and they have to basically be serviced on a somewhat regular basis. If you need to have good repeatability on that force control, and we’ll gloss over issues like cost and power consumption and replacing compressors and air dryers and all that. Going to a smart linear motor or integrated linear motor, because it’s fully integrated, means it’s a much smaller footprint.  Also, our devices are all low-voltage DC, which makes them very well suited for mobile applications. So things that are running off of a battery or maybe it’s an alternator system. You know, we’ve got lots of applications that are vehicle-mounted, more onto like semiautonomous driving systems and that kind of stuff. But obviously there’s other applications in the manufacturing space. By having that force control functionality in that back-drive ability, as well as tons of data that can be streamed very rapidly, that unlocks a lot of very, very cool applications in those spaces, which I unfortunately can’t really talk too much about. But yeah, I think long term, obviously, we all know this is where things are going. The things that I can talk about, definitely, end-of-arm tooling, as I mentioned polishing and grinding applications. That would be a good example of that, and also by virtue of being able to eliminate all these external sensors and the encoders and the load cells because these are fully encapsulated IP68 devices, all fully potted. You know, we’re calling them a solid state motor, essentially, because it’s a single moving part, they’re significantly more robust, specifically talking about load cells. They’re kind of fragile little things. You hit them in the wrong way, they’re cooked. And so that allows them to be used in somewhat harsher environments. And by virtue of the fact that they can be set to be a compliant device. Locally, on the motor, that basically means that even if you had a lower-tech sort of system, you could use one of these devices, set it to say, hey, when X and Y and Z analog or digital signals are set to whatever, go to this force output and just hold it. And so that’s really useful for people who are, say, in the OEM space, looking at doing upgrades and modifications to their existing systems without wanting to get really, really deep in the weeds with huge amounts of redesign. So I don’t know if that answers your question or not, but that’s some of the spaces that we’re seeing there.

John Lewis: [00:16:48] Hey, you mentioned compliance, being a compliant device a couple of times, and I have to be honest, I’m not that familiar with what that term means. Would you mind clarifying it for me?

Patrick McFadden: [00:16:58] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so normally if you think about a robot, it goes to a position and holds it, goes to a position and holds it, typically position control. And if you go to grab onto the end of that arm and you try to move it back and forth, in most cases it’s not moving, which in a lot of applications is exactly what you want. Nice stiff, rigid for certain applications. That’s absolutely the right thing. But us being a compliant motor, we command a force. You tell the motor what you want it to do. It ultimately internally is commanding a force, and with that if you overload it and it’s not to exceed some amount of force, it will now comply. It will backdrop. Very smooth. So torque ripple, no cogging, no detents, or anything like that. It feels honestly like something that’s organic or like a spring.  And that’s basically what we mean by compliance here.

Patrick McFadden: [00:18:03] So let’s say you’ve got a robot arm or some other sort of more complex robotic system. They’re typically position controlled. So the kinematics model says go to position A, go to position B, go to position C. Maybe you’ve got sensors, so if it detects an obstacle or some force spikes beyond some limit, it’ll stop and throw a warning light. The advantage of using force-controlled motors is essentially the robot can be told to output an amount of force until a position is reached. And that’s actually how organics work, right? You know, when you’re moving your arm, you’re not moving it to a position per se. You’re applying a certain amount of force to your muscle until you get to a position. So it’s getting a little bit into the weeds on the technical stuff, but that’s basically the sort of functionality that our type of technology unlocks. And smart devices, smart motors, ultimately, that’s where we think it’s ultimately going to go.

John Lewis: [00:19:06] Yeah. I appreciate the clarification, Patrick. I’m wondering how do you see smart linear drive technology such as yours contributing to efficiency and sustainability goals at manufacturers?

Patrick McFadden: [00:19:20] Yeah, for sure. Probably the lowest-hanging fruit on that. You know, not to hammer on it too hard because it’s not the only thing that’s out there. But pneumatics is a big one. The amount of electricity cost in running pneumatic systems is nontrivial. They are not very efficient, to say nothing of the overhead costs with replacing the equipment and the compressors and all that. So that’s definitely the biggest piece that we see. And we’re definitely not the only people playing in that space, looking at electrification. Obviously, with having data available, that can decrease spillage. You can you have tighter controls on your line, better repeatability. Having integrated position and force right there at the end of the robot arm, or even if it’s just a machine that’s knocking something off of a line or something, having that data right there can allow you to implement quality checks in the manufacturing process that you wouldn’t typically do. For example, there’s an application that I know that we’ve had where you’re knocking something and it can detect the mass of the thing that it’s hitting because it knows what the joules are when it hits it and how it accelerates or decelerates. And those are the sorts of things that are pretty tricky to implement using more traditional approaches. And that helps with things as well as typically faster line speed too. So you can move these motors a lot faster than a lot of other systems.

Dan McCarthy: [00:21:00] Patrick, a lot of what you talked about is robotics. And the integration of this technology obviously gives it some unique capabilities. Is robotics where are you seeing most of the applications within industry and manufacturing? Talk to us? I’m dying to ask you about examples of trends.

Patrick McFadden: [00:21:24] I unfortunately can’t really get into a lot of the nitty gritty because a lot of these things, we’re a subcomponent that often ends up in some other system. And there’s a few steps before it actually gets to the shop floor. You know, we think that there’s going to be a paradigm shift to having fully integrated systems. Smaller, more compact, more efficient, easier to install. I mean, cheaper – I won’t even get into that one. Big cost reductions.

Dan McCarthy: [00:21:53] Is this within robotics specifically? 

Patrick McFadden: [00:21:58] All applications. Anyway, cheaper. That’s the fastest way to describe it. Force is also typically an afterthought in most applications, mainly because traditionally it’s either been not great or has been ridiculously expensive, so you’d never really see it being used unless you really, really needed it. That being said, if you can drive the cost of all these systems down low enough to the point that we think it’s at now, now you’re giving the engineers and machine builders and the designers and even the techs on the floor the tools to now enable force control, force sensing. And that allows our customers to do some very interesting things.

Dan McCarthy: [00:22:54] Am I extrapolating here, but would that be greater cost efficiency? Is that the line you’re drawing here is that force previously was not a huge deal until it now has an ability to . . .

Patrick McFadden: [00:23:06] Yeah. Again, we come out, as I mentioned at the beginning, we came out of an aerospace background. And let’s say you wanted to have a compliant back-drivable motor in that space, for simulation is a good example. You could easily drop 10,000, 20,000 bucks on a single axis. You could go a lot higher than that if you wanted to. So you’re not going to put $520,000 little actuators in your machine typically. But if that $20,000 device now can be installed for like 1,500 bucks, we’re getting into different levels of numbers here. And again, because it’s fully integrated, it’s got all the logic and processing directly on the motor. And yeah, absolutely, you want to get deep in the weeds on the programming, you absolutely can. But if you don’t want to, and this is actually another interesting thing, we’re seeing, a lot of customers who are in environments, they’re in manufacturing, but they’re probably a smaller company. They don’t necessarily have a big IT team. They probably have engineers, but they’re probably mechanical. They probably don’t have much if any computer programming or software stuff. Some of these guys don’t even have PLCs in their facilities. And by having a device like ours, where all that technology and the intelligence and that software controllability is built into the motor, and they can access that through a laptop with free software, and they just point and click and drag a thingy around, that allows guys on the floor to be implementing some different sort of functionality that, again, you would never do if you’re having to do a custom-built $20,000 axis for one device.

Dan McCarthy: [00:25:01] So this paradigm shift you’re discussing, you’re telling us about, is this based on the customer trends you’re seeing, the customer requests you’re seeing?

Dan McCarthy: [00:25:08] Yeah, absolutely. And we’re actually seeing a bit of a split too. So you’ve got the robotics guys that are obviously going way up with what they’re doing with it. But again, they’re also being able to offload a lot of their processing to our motor, so again, they can just tell it to do the thing. And they can communicate using whatever fancy APIs you want. But at the same point, you’ve got folks who are looking at implementing automation into applications like a small cookie manufacturer is an example. Like these are not guys that are going to be buying a cobot or implementing fancy control systems or implementing vision or anything like that. But yeah a couple thousand bucks for a motor that they can preprogram to do a thing whenever a digital trigger is set. That’s a different level of enabling what the customer can do.

Dan McCarthy: [00:26:06] Speaking of customers, the adoption, is it largely being driven by OEMs who are trying to simplify their processes? I can see an advantage here to deployment as well. This is going to simplify deployment.

Patrick McFadden: [00:26:18] Yeah. Absolutely. So our primary drive is OEM. That’s where our focus is. But also integrators as well. Those are sort of our two main drivers. So direct sales to OEM is definitely where most of our business is. And then integrators as well because of how it eases adoption. And I guess we have a lot of people using them in test and measurement applications. So a lot of people are using them for product testing, line testing, some laboratory stuff, some sort of more aggressive sorts of things, product accelerated life testing, that kind of thing. Because some of the functionality that we’ve enabled for our customers in the robotics side is you can just plug this into USB, into a computer running MATLAB or LabVIEW, and there’s a bunch of libraries and they can be immediately using LabVIEW and doing science with this thing within 20 minutes of unpacking it. You’re not doing that if you have to wire up your motor drivers and controllers and, oh, I need fixturing for my position sensor and amplifiers for my load cell.

John Lewis: [00:27:27] I had a question, Patrick, about how these things are connected up. You know, with everything integrated, I’d like to know a little bit about how you actually wire them in, hook them up. Can they be linked in series, in parallel? Can they be set up as a leader and a follower to communicate with each other?

Patrick McFadden: [00:27:49] Yep. All of the above. Yeah, absolutely. They can be done in multiple ways too. Again, sort of the lowest common denominator, the easiest, lowest-tech way of doing it is we felt like a little breakout board that you can plug the motor directly into. And it’s got a pile of digital and analog Is and Os. And then using a little GUI you can configure it to do whatever. You want it to go to a position, you want to have it output a force, you want it to feed force data out on an analog channel. You want to feed position data out on an analog channel. You can you do all that. That’s the easiest way to do it. Next step up, basically, you can plug it directly into a PLC. And then we’ve got a bunch of libraries, so you can get the PLC to do whatever it is that you want it to do. And again, the full set of functionality is available there. And then for folks that are mostly more on the robotic stuff and they’re doing autonomous vehicles or ship-mounted equipment, that kind of thing, they’re typically talking directly to the motors over a serial link, and they can set their streaming data as fast as they want and running these things on FPGAs for fancy kinematics applications. So you can get as simple as you want or as complicated as you want basically.

John Lewis: [00:29:13] And we mentioned pneumatics a couple times and replacing pneumatics. And I’m just curious if these have enough force to replace other fluid power systems that might use hydraulics in certain applications?

Patrick McFadden: [00:29:26] Yeah, in some applications, yes. But definitely we’re not looking at putting these on a big excavator or anything like that anytime soon. Currently our largest motor outputs 200 and something pounds, 1,000 Newtons or something like that, whatever that is. So that’s sort of the force range. So in the realm of pneumatics is sort of where we’re at. And of course, smaller devices are another piece of it too.

Dan McCarthy: [00:30:03] Great. This is a lot to think about. Is there anything we haven’t asked?

Patrick McFadden: [00:30:13] Well, our feeling here is, we think this is where everything’s eventually going to go. Not just linear motors but rotary motors and all the rest of it. Moving the motor driver and the sensing and some level of the control directly onto the motor itself makes a lot of sense in our mind. You’ve got everything on one PCB. You don’t have a ton of cables going back to a control cabinet. You give it power, give it some sort of signal if you need it. In some cases, you don’t even need a signal. And you can unlock a lot of functionality. You can reduce a lot of footprint. And the big thing that we’re also finding is that there’s not enough people out there doing this work. There’s not enough engineers out there doing this work. Not enough technicians out there doing this work. Not enough guys on the shop floor. It’s hard to find people. Going to a fully integrated solution saves so much time with respect to integration, right? Again, you’re not having to run a bunch of extra cables. You’re not having to figure out how to program this or that or like, oh no, the firmware on this motor driver is not the right firmware. It’s not going to be compatible with this controller. You know, bug hunting a disconnected cable for an encoder somewhere. It eliminates all that hassle. So it allows you to be up and running really, really fast, which irrespective of the fact that we’re seeing huge cost savings on the equipment itself, also the amount of money that you’re saving on the amount of time that the customer is needing to spend to get this thing up and running. That’s a big saver too, because if they don’t have to spend three days messing around getting these things wired up, they can spend those three days dealing with their actual problem that they have, not how to make a motor move in and out.

Dan McCarthy: [00:32:13] What about maintenance? The one counterargument I ever hear about integration is maintenance, because you have to dig deeper into a system to find the problem.

Patrick McFadden: [00:32:23] Absolutely a great, great question. So from a mechanical maintenance standpoint, again, these sorts of devices that we’re talking about, it’s direct drive, basically it’s fully solid state. All the components are fully plotted. So there’s no gears to wear out. There’s no seals to wear out. There are bushings, but they’re standard, easy to pop out in the field. And depending on what side load you’re putting on these things, hundreds of millions of cycles on these guys. By being fully potted, fully encapsulated, they’re waterproof. They’re being used in maritime applications. Very hard to kill. We’re seeing, especially compared against pneumatics or some ball screw applications, significantly longer life spans, by a very big margin. Of course, the counterargument. Okay, sure. You know, what happens if your motor driver burns up?

Dan McCarthy: [00:33:22] At least you’ve isolated the problem.

Patrick McFadden: [00:33:24] Anyway, fully integrated and modern electronics these days, pretty reliable.

Dan McCarthy: [00:33:35] Patrick, this has been very illuminating. I find this technology very interesting. I’ll be paying close attention to it. See if that paradigm shift comes about.  But for now, we’d like to thank you for joining us and Iris Dynamics for giving us a little time to illuminate a little bit more about what your technology is about and where it’s headed. If you have any questions for Patrick, feel free to send them to us or post them on LinkedIn, and we will get back to you with those answers. If you’re interested in past episodes of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, you can find them on our website, manufacturing-matters.com. And for anyone wishing to be in the loop on upcoming conversations about automation, please follow us on LinkedIn. But for today, Patrick, thanks again, John, thank you and thanks to the rest of you for joining us.

Patrick McFadden: [00:34:24] Thanks so much, everybody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan McCarthy: [00:02:15] That’s right. Everything’s evolved from there, from your motion control. Right? That’s correct.

Patrick McFadden: [00:02:18] Yeah. Yeah.

Dan McCarthy: [00:02:20] Yeah. In, uh.

John Lewis: [00:02:21] In manufacturing, you know, you know, in terms of, you know, an existing labor shortage and increased use of automation, you know, can you talk about some applications of direct linear drive technology for automating routine tasks, you know, and what the benefits are compared, you know, to using traditional drive systems?

Patrick McFadden: [00:02:40] Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it’s it’s an interesting question because it’s it’s somewhat diverse list of benefits. Um, I guess one of the things to, to sort of, you know, drill home with, you know, smart devices, which is sort of, you know, one of the places that we’re, um, one of the ways we’re basically describing this, this kind of device. They’re they’re fully integrated, at least in our perspective. They’re they’re fully integrated devices. So that means like the motor driver itself, the the stators, the motor controller, all the position sensing. And in our case, force sensing is all fully baked into the motor. Um, it’s one device that you don’t need to have a quite as many cables going back to the cabinet on the other side of the room. Um, because of that, they’re much faster and easier to install. Um, you don’t need to have nearly the same amount of engineering time spent to get these things up and running. Um, because you have this, um, fully integrated device, you and you have a lot of logic processing on board. You have the ability to measure and report force. Um, you can use these devices in applications that, frankly, you know, you really couldn’t use before. So some of the tasks that we’re finding right now in the manufacturing space. Um, a lot of assembly tasks. So things like press fitting inserts and needing to make sure that, you know, you have, you know, the right distance as well as the right amount of force being applied during that process. You know, if you exceed some force threshold or some position number isn’t met, you know, it can throw an alarm.

Patrick McFadden: [00:04:08] Um, applications like driving and hammering rivets, uh, or other sorts of, of things like that. Um, lots of applications where you might want to maintain a constant amount of pressure to something. And again, because it’s a compliant motor back drivable motor. Uh, so, you know, things like rolling mills and that, kind of that kind of thing. You have like a drag knife or you’ve got like a sensor that you need to have. Right. Uh, being, you know, constantly pressed against something and maybe the, uh, um, uh, the thickness of the material is varying. Um, lots of applications where, like, you’re synchronizing movement. Um, uh, honestly, you know, in, in the manufacturing space, if you wanted to have an application where you have, you know, some amount of force control, the most practical way to do that right now is basically with pneumatics. Um, you know, you can adjust the amount of pressure in your system, and that’s how you could. You can make them work, and that works great to a point. But, um, you know, as the seals wear out, uh, as they get stiff, you know, your calibration gets to go out of whack eventually. And if you’ve got an application where you might have to have, you know, a number of motors firing, synchronized, synchronized, but with a certain amount of force, um, that can be a problem. And so we’re finding a lot of applications in those sorts of spaces to, um, fixturing workholding and that sort of thing.

John Lewis: [00:05:27] Yeah. Just a quick, quick follow up on that. You talked about, you know, uh, a little bit about making these systems smart and, and how that expands or influences how how the motors are applied. Um, can you can you talk about, uh, you know, how how smart should these motors be?

Patrick McFadden: [00:05:44] Yeah. It’s a it’s a good question. Uh, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, again, as I mentioned, um, you know, smart, smart motor in our, in our definition here is again fully integrated. So you’ve got.

Speaker4: [00:05:55] Um.

Patrick McFadden: [00:05:56] You’ve got all the, all the electronics that that are needed to make it work, living directly on the motor. So you’re not going off and buying a separate motor drivers. You’re not buying, you know, separate VFD. You’re not necessarily buying a separate motor or a separate control device. Um, as well as obviously all the sensors and all that are all fully integrated. Um, and the advantages of doing that, um, obviously all the integration stuff we sort of touched on already, uh, less cabling, easier setup. You don’t have to mess around as much with, you know, calibrating everything because it’s already pre-done. Um, but the other side of this equation is by moving the motor control, specifically all the control loops, like the PIDs and all that locally to the motor. Um, you can now have the motor do some kind of interesting things. Um, much, much faster response times and much lower latency. Um, but, you know, for example, if you wanted to measure changes in mechanical backlash, uh, you could do that because, again, you’ve got force data as well as position data all being processed locally very, very quickly on the motor. Um, and um, yeah, I mean, you can get into a lot of, lot of discussions about that. How how smart it should be is a good question. Um, one of the things that we found specifically with our customers in the robotics space is because we’ve been able to move so much of that overhead equipment, which is also point on footprint, but move that into the motor itself. You can offload a lot of the processing power that the that the main control device was having to do before. So now at this point the motor can or the the robot’s controller can say, okay, hey, I need you to perform an action. And then how that action gets performed can be dealt with directly on the motor itself.

Dan McCarthy: [00:07:42] So that involves logic obviously. Um, yeah. Is the logic component that you also provide or do you provide the software. How does that what are the controls. Yeah.

Patrick McFadden: [00:07:49] So yeah for sure. So so it’s it’s all built into the motor itself. So it’s built into the motor’s firmware. Okay. And and there’s a lot of different ways you can control it. You know, one of the interesting things we found at our last automate show actually, was a lot of people wanted the functionality of these higher level controls that I’m going to talk about in a minute, but they didn’t necessarily want to have to like, you know, get deep into the weeds of of integrating it and programming it. And a lot of these folks now are just using, you know, very simple digital or analog triggers to then have the motor itself do some really complicated things, which means they don’t have to write a line of code, but they can still get the functionality I’m going to talk about. So, um, again, having having this integrated force control feature, again without the need for external load cells or external encoders and some interesting black box stuff on how we’re pulling that off. Um, you can you can have a number of different control modes operating locally, fully on board the motor. So um, things like force mode. So it outputs a constant force. So, you know, tell it to output x number of Newtons. And it’ll do that regardless if you know, it’s it’s being back driven forward or backwards. So applications like polishing and grinding, as I mentioned, like drag knives, rolling mills, that sort of application, um, position mode, uh, something everyone’s going to be familiar with obviously go to position A, go to position B straightforward.

Patrick McFadden: [00:09:07] Obviously we can do that. Um kinematics mode which is, which is the interesting one that, uh, we’ve been finding a lot of customers using. So again, you can basically pre-program sets of profiles that you want the motor to do. And those can then be triggered from like a simple digital signal. Right. So for example, if you’re doing like a, like a replacement of a pneumatic system, um, you can tell the motor, hey, I want you to do this motion profile just by plugging it into a laptop. A little simple free guy that we have, you can program it. You don’t have to write any code. Hit save. And every time this digital line gets pulled high or low, it’ll do the thing. And. And then in this particular case, the cool thing with that is you can then wire that in to the exact same solenoid control signal that you were previously using in your pneumatic system. Okay. But now this is going to be constantly, constantly performing the the correct movement all the time. Every time. Um, and then the other one was kind of interesting would be what we’re referring to as the haptics mode, uh, where basically the motor acts as a programmable spring or programmable damper. Uh, you know, it can simulate inertia, it can simulate mass, vibrations, whatever. And it can do these modes sort of stacked on top of each other. So this is sort of the functionalities that you can you can do with these devices.

Dan McCarthy: [00:10:21] Just just another quick follow up. Sorry John, but I’m curious, what are we talking about. Is machine learning uh, possible additions to this this technology that you could. Yeah.

Patrick McFadden: [00:10:30] It’s. Yeah. No, it’s a great question. Obviously, that comes up a fair bit in our conversations with people. Uh, so, I mean, robots are are obviously blind unless you add vision to them, uh, and robots can’t feel unless you add more sensors to them. Right. Um, and of course, you know, you can do all those things, but they cost time. They cost money. You got to have cables. You got to have, you know, sensor amplifiers and image processors and all that nonsense. Right. And if you if you need that, absolutely go off and do it. Um, the advantage of using a smart motor or a smart device, like, like, like what we’re offering, at least in the linear space, um, it allows you to have a lot more functionality without the need to have all of those additional sensors and all that additional, uh, overhead, both from install and from mechanical stuff. Uh, and, you know, for example, let’s say you had a pneumatic a, a line where it has a bunch of pneumatic systems, pneumatic motors doing things, and you want it to throw throw some fancy machine learning at that, or you want it to do like predictive maintenance or something like that, right? Um, well, you probably don’t have position data on those motors. Probably only have a rough idea what the force data is.

Patrick McFadden: [00:11:46] You probably have like the PSI of the system. You definitely don’t have a load cell on the end of every single pneumatic piston. Uh, and the advantage of, of, of using this sort of approach into an application like that is now all of a sudden, hey, you’ve got a ton of data available. Uh, now the motors can deal with a bunch of that internally themselves. So they can they can make sure they’re, you know, adjusting and increasing or decreasing force to, to hit whatever it is that you need to do. So you can, you know, get better line speed, you can get better repeatability, all that jazz. But at the same point, if you are looking at integrating some of these, you know, higher level, um, you know, things and say, you know, AI and machine, machine learning and all that. The data is now available for you. So we we aren’t looking at, um, implementing AI systems or machine learning ourselves. We’re enabling. That’s the whole point. Yeah. Um, and and also like, again, like that’s just comes with, with with the beasts of, of what we’re providing the data is there. You can use it if you want to. You don’t have to. Um, but it’s there should you decide you want to use it. Very cool.

John Lewis: [00:12:48] Hey, Patrick, you talked a little bit about it a few times now about replacing pneumatic technology. Um, and, you know, I see, uh, pneumatics is often used in advanced robotics. And I’m wondering, um, uh, if and how is smart linear drive technology being used in advanced robotics? You know, uh, like to provide high precision motion control, maybe in the end of ARM tooling, uh, you know, maybe working with cobots or autonomous robots, you know, for doing different tasks like assembly, packaging or machine tending.

Patrick McFadden: [00:13:21] Yeah, absolutely. No, no. Um, again, great. Great questions. So, um, a lot of applications, obviously. Um, you might want to have some sort of force for sensing force control, specifically in, you know, cobalt applications and end of ARM tooling. Uh, and, you know, a few ways you can do it. It’s usually done, as I mentioned, with, with a load cell or some sort of force sensor. Um, and, and of course, in those applications, it’s usually like the robot goes to a position and do not exceed a force. Right. So it’s not necessarily back drivable, not necessarily compliant. There are ways of doing that, but complicated and expensive and somewhat rare, to be honest, in manufacturing environments. Pneumatics. Obviously easier to install, easier to use. But there’s problems. You don’t have data and they have to basically be serviced on a somewhat regular basis. If you need to have good repeatability on that force control, and we’ll gloss over issues like cost and power consumption and replacing compressors and air dryers and all that. Uh, going to a smart, smart linear motor or integrated linear motor, um, because it’s fully integrated means it’s a much smaller footprint. Um, also, our devices are all low voltage DC, uh, which makes them very well suited for mobile applications. So things that are running off of battery or maybe it’s an alternator system. You know, we’ve got lots of applications that are vehicle mounted, um, more onto like semi-autonomous driving.

Speaker5: [00:14:47] Systems.

Patrick McFadden: [00:14:48] And.

Speaker5: [00:14:48] That kind of stuff.

Patrick McFadden: [00:14:49] But obviously there’s other applications in the manufacturing space. Um, by having, um, by having that, uh, force control functionality in that back drive ability, as well as tons of data that can be streamed very rapidly, um, that unlocks a lot of very, very cool applications in those spaces, which I unfortunately can’t really talk too much about. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think long term, obviously we all know this is where, where things are going. Um, the things that I can talk about definitely end of ARM tooling. Um, you know, as I mentioned, polishing and grinding applications. That would be a good example of that. Um, and also by virtue of having to or being able to eliminate, um, you know, all these external sensors and the encoders and the load cells because these are fully encapsulated, you know, Ip68 devices, all fully potted. You know, we’re calling them a solid state motor, essentially, because it’s a single moving part. Um, there’s significantly more robust. Specifically, you know, talking about load cells, they’re kind of fragile little things. You hit them in the wrong way. They’re they’re cooked. Um, and so that allows them to be used in somewhat harsher environments. And by virtue of the fact that, you know, they’re, they’re they can be set to be a compliant device, um, locally on the motor. Um, you know, that basically means that even if you had like a, you know, sort of a lower tech sort of system, um, you could use one of these devices, set it to say, hey, when, when, you know, X and Y and Z, uh, analog or digital signals are set to whatever, um, go to go to this force output and just hold it. And so that’s, that’s really useful for people who are like, say in the OEM space looking at doing, um, you know, uh, upgrades and modifications to their existing systems without wanting to get really, really deep in the weeds with huge amounts of redesign. Um, yeah. So I don’t know if that answers your question or not, but that’s some of the spaces that that we’re seeing there.

John Lewis: [00:16:48] Hey, hey, you mentioned compliance. Being a compliant device a couple of times, and then I have to be honest, I’m not that familiar with what that term means. Would you mind clarifying it for me? Yeah.

Patrick McFadden: [00:16:58] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, um. Okay, so normally if you think about, like, a robot, uh, you know, it goes to a position and holds it right, goes to a position and holds it and typically position control, uh, and, you know, if you go to grab onto the end of that, that arm and you try to move it back and forth, it’s in most cases it’s not moving, uh, which in a lot of applications is exactly what you want. Nice stiff, rigid, uh, for certain applications. That’s absolutely the right, uh, the right thing. Uh, but us being a compliant motor, um, we command a force. So you tell them. Well, let me rephrase it. You tell the motor you want it to do it. Ultimately, internally is commanding a force. Um, and with that, if you overload it and you know, it’s not to exceed some amount of force, it will now comply. It will. It will. Backdrop very smooth. So no, no torque ripple. No, no cogging, no detents or anything like that. Just, you know, it feels honestly like like like, um, something that’s organic or like a spring. Um, and that’s basically what we mean by, by, by compliance here.

Patrick McFadden: [00:18:03] So, um, typically a robot, you know, you’re going to let’s say you’ve got like a robot arm or like some, some other sort of, you know, sort of more complex robotic system. They’re typically position controlled. So, you know, the kinematics model says go to position A, go to position B, go to position C, maybe you’ve got sensors. So you know if it detects an obstacle or some force spikes beyond some limit, it’ll stop and throw a throw a warning light. Um, the advantage of using force controlled motors is essentially the robot can be told to, um, output an amount of force until a position is reached. And that’s actually how how? You know, US organics work, right? You know, when you’re moving your arm, you’re not moving it to a position per se. You’re applying a certain amount of force to your muscle until you get to a position. So, um, it’s getting a little bit into the weeds on the technical stuff, but that’s basically the sort of functionality that our type of technology unlocks. And smart smart devices, smart motors, ultimately, it’s very cool applications. That’s where we think it’s ultimately going to go.

John Lewis: [00:19:06] Yeah. I appreciate the clarification, Patrick. Yeah. Um, I’m wondering how how do you see smart linear drive technology such as yours contributing to efficiency and sustainability goals at manufacturers?

Patrick McFadden: [00:19:20] Yeah for sure. Probably the lowest hanging fruit on that. You know, not to not to hammer on it too hard because it’s it’s not it’s not the, the only thing that’s out there. But pneumatics is a big one. Um, uh, the amount of, um, uh, you know, electricity cost in running pneumatic systems is, um, non-trivial. They are not very efficient, uh, to say nothing of the, the overhead costs, um, with replacing the equipment and the compressors and all that. So that’s definitely the biggest the biggest piece that we see. And we’re definitely not the only people playing in that space looking at electrification. Um, obviously with having data available that can increase or decrease spillage, you can you can have tighter controls on your line, better repeatability. Um, having integrated position and force right there at the, at the, at the end of the robot arm. Um, or, you know, even if it’s just a machine that’s knocking something off of a line or something. Um, having that data right there can allow you to implement like quality checks in the manufacturing process that you know, you wouldn’t typically do. Um, you know, for example, there’s a, an application that I know that we’ve, um, had where, um, you know, you’re knocking something and it can detect the mass of the thing that it’s hitting because, you know, it knows how many knows what the jewels are when it hits it and how it accelerates or decelerates. Um, and those are the sorts of things that, you know are pretty tricky to implement using more traditional approaches. And, you know, that helps with things as well as typically faster line speed, too. So you can, you know, you can move these motors a lot faster than a lot of other systems.

 

Dan McCarthy: [00:21:00] Patrick. A lot of what you talked about is robotics. And, you know, the integration of this technology is, you know, obviously gives it some unique capabilities. Is your robotics where are you seeing most of the applications within industry and manufacturing or talk to us? I’m dying to ask you about examples of. Stroke trends of where this technology. Sure. Yeah.

Patrick McFadden: [00:21:24] No. And I unfortunately can’t really get into a lot of the, a lot of the nitty gritty because, you know, a lot of these things, you know, we’re we’re a subcomponent that often ends up in a subcomponent of some other system. And there’s a few there’s a few steps before it actually gets to the, to the shop floor. Um, you know, we think that there’s going to be a paradigm shift to having fully integrated systems, you know, smaller, more compact, more efficient, easier to install. I mean, cheaper when you get into that one that’s, you know, big, big cost reductions.

Dan McCarthy: [00:21:53] Is this within robotics specifically or are we talking larger like all all applications? Yeah.

Patrick McFadden: [00:21:58] Yeah, yeah. All applications. Um, especially when you start talking about, you know, the, the, you know, anyway, cheaper. That’s the fastest way to describe it. Um, force is also typically an afterthought in most applications, mainly because traditionally it’s either being, um, not great, uh, or has been ridiculously expensive, so you’d never really see it being used unless you really, really needed it. Okay, that being said, if you can drive the cost of all these systems down, um, low enough to the point that we think it’s at now, um, now you’re giving the engineers and machine builders and the designers and even like the techs on the floor, the tools to now enable force control, force sensing. And you know that that, you know, allows our customers to, um, to to do some very, very interesting things and, um. Yeah.

Dan McCarthy: [00:22:54] Or am I extrapolating here? But would that be cost more greater cost efficiency? Is is that the line you’re drawing here is that force previously was not a huge deal until it now has an ability to.

Patrick McFadden: [00:23:06] Yeah I mean yeah. Again we come out as I mentioned at the beginning here, you know, we came out of out of an aerospace background, right. Um, um, and let’s say you wanted to have a compliant back drivable motor in that space, you know, for simulation is a good example. Um, you could you could easily drop ten, 20,000 bucks on a single axis. Um, you could go a lot higher than that if you wanted to. Okay. Um, so, you know, you’re not going to put a, you know, you’re not going to put $520,000, um, you know, little, little actuators in your machine, uh, if you know, um, uh, typically. Right. But, you know, if that if that $20,000 device now can be installed for like 1500 bucks, you know, that’s that’s true. Okay. We’re getting into different, different, uh, different levels of, uh, of number here. Um, and again, you know, because it’s fully integrated, it’s got all the logic and processing directly on the motor. And yeah, absolutely. You want to get deep in the weeds on the programming. You absolutely can. But if you don’t want to. And this is actually a really interesting thing. We’re seeing a lot of customers who are, um, you know, in environments, you know, they’re in manufacturing, but, you know, they’re probably a smaller company. They don’t necessarily have, you know, like a big IT team. They, you know, they probably have engineers, but they’re probably mechanical. They probably don’t have much, if any, uh, you know, computer programming or software stuff. Some of these guys don’t even have PLCs in their facilities. Um, and, you know, by having a device like ours where all that technology and the intelligence and that software controllability is built into the motor, and they can access that through a laptop with free software. And they just, you point and click and drag a thing around that. That allows some guys on the on the floor to be implementing, you know, some different sort of functionality that, again, you would never you would never do if you’re having to do, you know, a custom built $20,000, um, uh, axis for, you know, 111 device. Right.

Dan McCarthy: [00:25:01] Yeah. So this paradigm shift you’re discussing, you’re telling us about is this based on the customer trends you’re seeing, the customer requests you’re seeing is.

Patrick McFadden: [00:25:08] Yeah, absolutely.

Dan McCarthy: [00:25:09] Is it all going in one direction? Okay. Yeah.

Patrick McFadden: [00:25:11] Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, and we’re we’re actually seeing a bit of a split too. So you’ve got the robotics guys that are obviously going, you know, way up with their with what they’re doing with it. But again, you know, they’re, they’re also being able to offload a lot of their processing you know to our motor. Right. Because again you know they don’t need to deal with the pipes and all that. They can just tell it to do the thing. And you know, they can communicate using whatever fancy APIs you want. But at the same point, you’ve got folks who are looking at implementing automation, you know, into applications like a small a small like cookie manufacturer. Right? Is an example. Like, you know, these are not guys that are going to be, you know, buying a cobot or implementing, implementing, you know, fancy control systems or implementing vision or anything like that. But yeah, you know, a couple thousand bucks for a motor that they can pre-program to do a thing whenever, you know, like a digital trigger is, is, is, is set. That’s, that’s a different that’s a different level of um, of, of uh, enabling what the customer can do. Sure.

Dan McCarthy: [00:26:06] Yeah. And actually, speaking of customers, it is it’s largely being driven by the adoption. Is it largely being driven by by OEMs who are trying to simplify their processes? I can see an advantage here to deployment as well. This is going to simplify deployment if you can.

Patrick McFadden: [00:26:18] Yeah. Absolutely. So our primary drive is OEM. That’s that’s where that’s where our focus is. But also integrators as well. Yeah. So those are sort of our two our two main drivers. So direct sales to OEM is definitely where where most of our business is. And then integrators as well because of how it eases adoption.

Speaker5: [00:26:38] Um and, um.

Patrick McFadden: [00:26:39] And I guess we have a lot of people using them in like, uh, test and measurement applications. So a lot of people are using them for, um, uh, product testing, line testing. Um, um, you know, some laboratory stuff, some, you know, sort of more, more aggressive sorts of things. Um, product accelerated life testing, that kind of thing. Um, because, you know, some of the functionality that we’ve enabled for our customers in the robotics side is you can just plug this, you know, into USB, into a computer running Matlab or LabVIEW, and there’s a bunch of libraries and they can be immediately using LabVIEW and doing science with this thing. Like, right. You know, like within, you know like 20 minutes of unpacking it. That’s very cool. Yeah. I mean, you know, you’re not doing that if you have to wire up your, your motor drivers and controllers and oh, I need fixturing for my position sensor and, you know, amplifiers for my load cell.

Dan McCarthy: [00:27:27] You want to science.

Patrick McFadden: [00:27:28] Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.

John Lewis: [00:27:29] So yeah, I had a question, Patrick, about, you know, how these things are connected up. You know, with everything integrated, you know, just I’d like to know a little bit about, you know, how you actually wire them in, hook them up. Can they be can they be linked in series in parallel? Can they be set up as a leader and a follower to communicate with each other? Yep.

Patrick McFadden: [00:27:49] All of the above. Yeah, absolutely. And it can be. They can be done in multiple ways too. Um, again, you know, sort of the, the, the lowest common denominator, the easiest, lowest tech way of doing it is we felt like a little breakout board that you can plug the motor directly into. And it’s got a pile of, uh, digital and analog I’s and O’s. And then using, uh, using a little guy, you can configure it to do whatever you want it to, um, go to a position, you want to have it output a force, you want it to, um, feed force data out on an analog channel. You want to feed position data out on an analog channel. You can you can do all that. That’s the easiest way to do it. Um, next step up. Uh, basically, you can plug it directly into a PLC. Uh, and then we’ve got a bunch of libraries so you can get the PLC to do whatever it is that you want it to do. Um, and again, the full set of functionality is available there. And then for folks that are, um, mostly more on, like the, uh, robotic stuff and like, they’re doing, you know, autonomous vehicles or or, you know, ship mounted equipment, um, that kind of thing. Um, they’re typically talking directly to the motors over, over a serial link. Um, and, you know, they can set their streaming data as, as fast as they want and, you know, running these things on FPGAs for fancy kinematics applications. So you can you can get as, as simple as you want or as complicated as you want, basically. Cool.

John Lewis: [00:29:13] Cool. And I we mentioned pneumatics a couple times and replacing pneumatics. And I’m just curious if these are, uh, have enough force to replace like, other fluid power systems like that might use hydraulics in certain applications?

Patrick McFadden: [00:29:26] Yeah, in some applications, yes. But definitely, you know, we’re not we’re not looking at putting these on like, you know, a big, big excavator or anything like that anytime soon.

Speaker6: [00:29:34] Um, yeah. So there.

Patrick McFadden: [00:29:36] Um, you know, our currently our largest motor outputs, uh, uh, 200 and something pounds thousand Newtons or something like that, whatever that is. Um, and, um, yeah. So that’s sort of the force range. So, um, in, in the realm of pneumatics, um, um, is sort of where we’re at. And of course, smaller devices, um, uh, are another, another piece of it too. So.

[00:30:03] Cool, great. Yeah.

Dan McCarthy: [00:30:05] This is a lot to think about. Is there anything we haven’t asked that, uh, that you feel it’s you? Yeah.

Patrick McFadden: [00:30:13] Well, I mean, you know, I, you know, our our our feeling here is, um, you know, we think this is where everything’s eventually going to go. Uh, not just linear motors, but rotary motors and all the rest of it, um, moving the motor driver and the sensing and, and some level of the control directly onto the motor itself makes a lot of sense in our mind. It does.

Speaker5: [00:30:34] Um, you know.

Patrick McFadden: [00:30:35] You’ve got everything on one PCB. You don’t have, you know, a ton of cables going back to a control cabinet. You give it power, give it some sort of signal if you need it. And in some cases, you don’t even need a signal. Um, and, and, you know, you can you can unlock a lot of functionality. You can reduce a lot of footprint. And, you know, the big thing that we’re also finding is that, you know, um, you know, there’s not enough people out there doing this work. Uh, there’s not enough engineers out there doing this work. Not enough technicians out there doing this work. Not enough, uh, you know, guys on the shop floor, it’s hard to hard to find people, um, going to a fully integrated solution saves so much time with respect to integration, right? Again, you’re not you’re not having to run a bunch of extra cables. You’re not having to figure out how to program this or that or like, oh no, the firmware on this motor driver is not the right firmware. It’s not going to be compatible with this, uh, with this controller. Right? Um, you know, bug hunting, you know, a disconnected, uh, cable for like, A for for an encoder somewhere. It eliminates all that all that hassle. So it allows you to be up and running really, really fast, which, you know, irrespective of, you know, the fact that, you know, um, you know, we’re seeing huge costs, cost savings on the equipment itself. Also the amount of money that you’re saving on, on, you know, the amount of time that, uh, that the customer is needing to spend to get this thing up and running. That’s a big saver, too, because, you know, if they don’t have to spend three days messing around, getting these things wired up, they can spend those three days dealing with their actual problem that they have, right? Not not how to make a motor move in and out.

Dan McCarthy: [00:32:13] What about maintenance? Is the one counterargument I ever hear about integration is maintenance, because you have to dig deeper into a system to find the problem. But is that.

Patrick McFadden: [00:32:23] Absolutely a great, great question. So, um, from a mechanical maintenance standpoint, again, you know, these sorts of devices that we’re talking about, direct drive, basically it’s fully solid state. All the components are fully plotted. So, you know, it’s there’s no gears to wear out. There’s no seals to wear out. You know, there’s some bushings, but they’re, you know, standard, I guess part easy to pop out in the field too. And, you know, I mean, like depending on what side load you’re putting on these things, you know, we’re, you know, hundreds of millions of cycles on these guys, uh, by being fully, fully ported, fully encapsulated. Uh, they’re, uh, waterproof. They’re being used in maritime applications, um, very hard to kill. Um, and so, yeah, like we’re seeing especially compared against pneumatics or some ballscrew applications, um, significantly longer lifespans, um, by a very big margin. So, yeah. Um, and of course, the counter-argument. Okay. Sure. You know, what happens if your motor driver, uh, burns up and I’m in a, in a traditional place?

Dan McCarthy: [00:33:22] You’ve isolated the problem, right? Yeah.

Patrick McFadden: [00:33:24] You’ve isolated, but, you know, with these devices, you know, you’ve, you know, um, anyway, fully integrated and, you know, modern electronics these days, pretty reliable. So yeah. That’s fair.

Dan McCarthy: [00:33:35] Well, yeah. Patrick, this has been very illuminating. I find this technology very interesting. I’ll be paying close attention to it. Uh, see if that paradigm shift comes about. Um, but for now, we’d like to, uh, thank you for joining us. Uh, and Iris dynamics for, uh, giving us a little time to illuminate a little bit more about what your technology is about and where it’s headed. Uh, if you have any questions for Patrick or, uh, feel free to send them to us or post them on LinkedIn. Uh, and we will get back to you with those answers. If you’re interested in past episodes of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, you can find them on our website, manufacturing hyphen matters.com. And for anyone wishing to be in the loop on upcoming conversations about automation, please follow us on LinkedIn. But for today, Patrick, thanks again, John. Thank you and thank the rest of you for joining us.

Patrick McFadden: [00:34:24] Thanks so much, everybody.