Winn Hardin: [00:00:06] Hey everybody and welcome to Manufacturing Matters, where we talk about the trends and the technology that are reshaping the manufacturing industry. Thank you so much for joining us for our recent episode. I’m lucky enough to be here with my co-host John Lewis. How are you doing, John?

John Lewis: [00:00:20] Doing great, Winn. Glad to be here.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:22] Right above us, right now, Automate 2024 is going on. So around 20,000 of our closest friends are upstairs right now checking out all the technology. But we’re lucky enough to be down here with Robert and Tom from Wachendorff Automation. How are you doing, gentlemen?

Tom Bako: [00:00:35] Doing great. Thanks for having us. We appreciate it.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:00:38] Yeah. Thank you very much.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:39] Our pleasure. So do me a favor. Introduce yourself to the audience and then tell us a little bit about Wachendorff Automation.

Tom Bako: [00:00:47] I’m Tom Bako. I’m the business development manager for the USA. My responsibility is to help the Wachendorff team in the USA, North America.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:01:05] My name is Robert Wachendorff, and I’m the owner of Wachendorff Automation. We are experts in encoders, incremental and absolute encoders. We manufacture in Germany. We are around 150 people and we do optical, magnetic, and also absolute with all the interfaces you need for the industrial market, since a long time, 45 years.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:33] Yeah, as a matter of fact, I know earlier when we were up in the booth, and we’ll get into the technology, but one of the coolest things was the app. You know, I wanted you to bring the phone because they do near-field communication and be able to program the encoders on the fly, which makes real-time configuration super easy and simple and fast. But before we get into that, you might be asking yourself: What is the most exciting thing about encoders? And I would understand that. This is kind of a bits and bytes episode. This is how I think of it, where we talk about something small that’s in the industrial automation space but actually has a really large impact, something small that has a really large impact. And encoders are essentially how every machine knows where an object is or where movement, tracking, and all these. Whether we’re going to be tracking as part of an assembly operation, part of a pick-and-place operation. Force application, actuation. Encoders are used throughout all of modern manufacturing machinery today, correct? And the different technologies have different benefits in terms of optical, magnetic, other.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:02:34] Yes. That’s right. And we can go into details what is the difference between magnetic and optical if you like. Optical are more precise, but the magnetic technology is getting better and better all the time. So there will be a point, I assume, that the magnetic will be as good as the optical one. We use magnetic with specific software inside to increase the accuracy. This is done by software getting rid of all the noises in the magnet. So then we can detect much better than others the points, the position. And then we have higher accuracy up to 14, up to 16 bit at least.

Winn Hardin: [00:03:25] Beautiful. Okay. And so I think you just touched on one of the through points of this discussion, which is precise motion control, right? Because without precision we can’t dial up the speeds of our operations. We can’t manage throughput to the maximum. We can’t approach the theoretical limit of what a process will allow. And the more precise, I think that has some impact there. You want to talk a little bit about that?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:03:49] Yeah. Yes. For sure. Our customers they would like to be faster. So all the machines need to be faster, to have a better throughput, and that means the sensor needs to be closer to the process. Why? Because maybe you have slip or you have something like a play in it. And you need more information to go closer to the physical limit of the product you produce.

Winn Hardin: [00:04:22] So can you give us a real-world example of a process, maybe a packaging process or something?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:04:27] Well, for example, food and beverage. You can put the encoder far away and then you manufacture the food. Or if you go closer to the process, you need a stainless steel housing and you need protection for sealing and everything. So if there is something, dust, cleaning, and so on, there is no problem.

John Lewis: [00:04:50] And the benefit to getting closer to the process is that you don’t have that tolerance stackup that introduces error into the system that you need to compensate for?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:04:57] Yeah, exactly.

Winn Hardin: [00:05:00] Now, I know back in the old days, you’d have gear-to-gear transmission of power. We’re long past that. We’re more, you know, placing servos, motors right close to where we’re applying force. But it sounds like that doesn’t always mean that we have higher counts of encoders. We don’t have to use more encoders in that situation, correct?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:05:20] No, not really needed. Somehow maybe, but not really needed. It’s more if you go closer to the process, you not only have dust or something, you also have vibrations or higher temperature ranges. So you need to design the product that it lasts long in this application. So that’s the main thing. And for sure if you have too many components inside, the statistic says that it has maybe earlier a problem. So we try to reduce also the components just to have what is necessary for the encoder to do the job.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:00] So that’s what we were looking at here when you were showing me earlier the board. Tell us a little bit about that.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:06:05] Yes, that I can do with this. This small one is a multi-turn absolute encoder with interfaces like SSI or RS485. And this one is the board. The board of it. There’s no gearbox and no battery. So we have other companies using this type of technology, which is good, but not good enough for being close at the process or being outside  somewhere. And maybe I explain a little bit how it works. So the single turn is quite easy. So you have a magnet, and with a magnet you can measure the one turn. But if it comes to count the turns, somehow you need a counter. And the battery is easy. It’s just back up the counts in a processor in this kind of product to have a different gear ratio, turn ratio, so that if you turn 100 turns here, for example, then it’s only a short turn here inside. With our technology it’s a Wiegand wire. It’s a liquid magnet. And if the magnet pole turns a little bit, then it’s like an arrow and bow.

Winn Hardin: [00:07:36] The force is built up slowly?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:07:40] Yeah. The forces go slowly and then it turns from south to north, for example. And then there’s a spark, electrical spark. And with this electrical spark, we can power a chip, which stores that now is one turn. And there is a logical software with an additional sensor. Makes sure that it understands that it goes in one direction and the other direction. So all this is done by software. And then when the power comes back to the product, this information of the storage moves into the controller. And the product knows exactly where it is.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:27] So in the event of either a stoppage of the line or a power loss to the encoder, we’re still maintaining our counts and we know where our position is.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:08:36] Yes, exactly.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:37] So this does require some discrete power supply to it? Or is it solely a self-contained unit?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:08:44] It’s a self-contained unit for counting the turns. Otherwise you need the power for the chips, for the processor inside, for the software.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:56] Okay.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:08:57] And the thing is, you can see the board is very small. And this makes the product very robust. So it lasts in outdoor applications as well as in indoor with vibration, temperature, and everything.

Winn Hardin: [00:09:13] Right. Plus it has a compact footprint, which is more and more important for highly integrated machinery, which is kind of a standard trend going forward.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:09:21] That’s right. For example, if you go to AGVs, they are very small. So somehow you need to mount this. So that’s a good application for this kind of product. And you also have a little bit of vibration on the floor. So that helps.

John Lewis: [00:09:37] You talked about food processing, for example. Are there specific IP ratings you have to meet for those? Stainless steel?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:09:46] Yes, usually we have IP67. Also we can do IP68 with an additional ceiling. For the food industry, we have special ceilings for the food industry. For example, we have a customer who is making fish-cutting machines. And this machine is on a trawler. And he needs the ceiling. And he needs also the IP65. And he needs the stainless steel and also temperature, because in the wintertime it’s different than in the summertime.

Winn Hardin: [00:10:45] Absolutely. And I assume since we don’t have a battery in there, then that makes your components a lot more applicable to harsh environments?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:10:56] Yes. Usually we have no batteries in the car, so batteries are good in the harsh environment. But you know, our products work 10, 20, 25 years. So batteries are then obsolete.

Tom Bako: [00:11:16] And the waste that doesn’t occur from not having a battery is also an environmental consideration.

John Lewis: [00:11:26] It’s a maintenance issue as well. The batteries need to be replaced.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:11:31] Well, yeah, it needs to be replaced. But usually replacement doesn’t make sense in this case. Usually then they replace the whole line code.

Winn Hardin: [00:11:42] So we were just talking that, not having the battery, and you were telling me earlier that you’ve got an app which allows you with near-field communication to very quickly configure and swap out elements.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:12:16] Well, the reason why we did this is global logistics. You ship the product all over the world and you can combine this type of encoder, millions of different variations. So we thought about to reduce this only to the mechanical variations. And then you can ship it all over and will have less stock if you are able to configure the product at site. For example, you are a distributor. It’s also very, very easy to do. And so we thought: What would be the best programming tool? Smartphone. So this is easy because everybody has one. And as you can pay with a smartphone, you can program our product. And we added this plastic cap to have the NFC possibility. And then you have the app and you just configure the product with all the different things you need, channels and so on, pulses per revolution and so on. And then you just put it here and then you get the information to the encoder. And with the next power-on, it’s in the encoder. So now you think maybe, safety reasons, somebody wants to change during it works. So you need to power down and need to power up to do it. Also we have a PIN for security. And also if somebody wants to damage the machine, he don’t want to download an app and then program, he would go and cut somewhere a cable. So it’s a safe method to be flexible.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:08] Now we were talking earlier how precision motion control enables faster throughput on logistics lines. Production lines. You were talking specifically about bottling in that case. So that basically what we’re talking about there is the ability to move as fast as possible without having that bottle tip over, which is going to cause a cleanup issue or any number of lost downtime hours. And then we were talking about the sustainability without having the battery in there. And that also allows us to fulfill another major trend in automation, which is taking these technologies and tools out beyond the plant floor. And you were speaking specifically about the fishing trawler is a good example. Are there some other applications? I think you mentioned AGVs earlier.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:14:53] Yes. You know, the AGVs are driving more insight, but we have applications outside, for example, windmills, where you measure the position of the blades.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:09] Wind turbines. Yes, sir.

Tom Bako: [00:15:12] The turbine cabin as well.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:15:15] For example, the wind turbines where you measure the blades for the positioning for the wind. And cranes, with the cranes, it’s very important.

John Lewis: [00:15:33] You don’t want to have a cantilevered load that might cause it to tip over or sway.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:40] Exceed the outrigger requirements.

John Lewis: [00:15:43] Make sure the mass of the load with a different type of sensor. And the position of that and the angle of the crane hoist.

Tom Bako: [00:15:51] Or the extension of the boom, as well, is another point that you can also measure.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:15:57] And all this needs to be done with a small sensor, and weight also is important in this case. And all the robustness and vibration and temperature and all this.

Winn Hardin: [00:16:10] Absolutely. So we talked about a lot of different ways that something small actually impacts large applications that we may not always pay a lot of attention to. And what else? Can you tell us a little bit about what the future of encoder technology? Do we have anything major on the roadmap that that we can look forward to?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:16:30] Um, yes, we have, but it’s a secret. But I want to add something. We discussed a lot, in our company we discussed a lot about the cloud, having encoders for the cloud, and we decided not to do it, because most of the time our encoder has fast information. It’s fast information for the process. So you would have a lot of information in the cloud afterwards. So we think that all the time, the information goes to the PLC or to the drive, and the PLC and the drive calculate, recalculate, concentrate the data to bring the right information to the cloud or to the scatter system, whatever needed at this time.

John Lewis: [00:17:23] A bit more interested in maybe tracking energy usage in equipment than where the position of the servo motor is at a certain stage of the process.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:17:32] If you go for predictive maintenance, you have the temperature or the vibration in the encoder and give some information back to the PLC: now the vibration is exceeded, so the bearings of the motor is maybe not as good as before. Something like this.

Winn Hardin: [00:17:49] So another safety element there or in that case predictive maintenance-type information. And since the PLCs and/or the drives usually have communication interfaces built into them, does that allow you to maybe offer additional functionality without having to increase the price, like the NFC programmability and configuration. By using the PLC for that communication, does that help to further simplify and make a more attractive price point?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:18:19] You mean compared to the NFC or not NFC?

Winn Hardin: [00:18:25] Compared to if you had an encoder that was trying to send data to the cloud, for example.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:18:29] Okay. Yes. An NFC is much less expensive. And the costs. And we have some information in our encoder where we could send to the smartphone. So how many counts are already done and so on? How many hours power-on? So there are some data that we could get out of our encoder into the smartphone and also somewhere in the cloud. The application is not ready now. So it works in our application.

Winn Hardin: [00:19:09] We got one future secret. And we’re just going to keep Robert on this podcast until he tells us the whole roadmap. We’re just going to keep going around. So cool. So that’s a different function that we might be seeing. What’s the name of the app by the way?

Robert Wachendorff: [00:19:23] WDGA.

Winn Hardin: [00:19:29] All right. So is there anything that we haven’t covered today when we’re talking about the different applications? We talked about safety at lots of different levels: safety for equipment, safety for large operations and user safety, not exceeding thresholds on the crane.

Tom Bako: [00:21:02] So stay tuned for developments in the direction of Internet of Things and data and connectivity. Predictive maintenance. We like to think that we’re at the spearhead of that development.

Winn Hardin: [00:22:11] When it comes to encoders.

Tom Bako: [00:22:13] Correct.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:22:14] I think at the end, our encoders themselves, they just make a job. So the best thing is nobody knows that it’s inside and it works. Over decades, and nobody take care. And that’s the main job I’m responsible for. So all these theories are important, but at the end, our customers would like to see a reliable product all the time, over years.

Winn Hardin: [00:23:00] Absolutely. They want to be able to forget about you.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:23:03] They don’t want to know me.

Winn Hardin: [00:23:06] At least until they’re building the next machine.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:23:08] Yeah, and then we are there.

Winn Hardin: [00:23:10] Fantastic. Gentlemen, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy week to come down and spend some time with us and talk to us a little bit about encoders and how important they are to the general automation space. Remember, precision control means higher throughput means happier customers. We’ve got lots of safety components that are built into this particular system. The near-field communication is definitely an inspiration. So I think that’s just really cool with the fast configuration and reset and reducing part count for spare parts and for simplifying supply chains for distributors who are having to support a whole bunch of different customers and different industries. You can have just a few different models that you can optimize for whatever new system or replacement part is needed. That’s all good stuff. So thanks again for sharing it with us. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Manufacturing Matters. If you’ve got any questions, please just send them below. We’ll make sure we get them to Tom and Robert, or feel free to reach out to — what’s our URL guys?

Tom Bako: [00:24:09] Wachendorff.com.

Winn Hardin: [00:24:14] Wachendorff.com. Doesn’t get any simpler than that, so feel free to go right to their website, check out some of the new apps and the encoder information that’s on there. If you’d like to check out our old episodes, go to Manufacturing-Matters.com. If you’d like to be on a future episode, reach out to us, and you can find us on all your major podcast platforms. Thanks again for your time today and I look forward to the next episode of Manufacturing Matters.

Robert Wachendorff: [00:24:38] Yeah, thank you very much.