New RTC4 Board Interface
At the Laser 2003 trade show, SCANLAB AG will introduce its RTC 4 PC Interface Board. The RTC 4 is the newest member of SCANLAB's very successful family of PC interface boards for controlling scan heads via the digital transfer protocol or SCANLAB's optical data interface.
Expanding on the functionality of its predecessor, the RTC 4 can communicate with the processors integrated in SCANLAB's new intelliSCAN scan heads. The RTC 4 can transfer current status parameters of the scan head axes (e.g. position, speed, amplifier current) to the PC in real time – useful, for example, in scan head control for high-precision and medical applications. Additionally, the RTC 4 can query the extended diagnosis functions of digital scan heads for information such as motor and scan head temperatures, accumulated operating hours, serial number, scan head type and date-of-manufacture. Furthermore software commands allow selection of various scan head tuning profiles to optimize performance for particular processing tasks.
The RTC 4 offers more memory and faster performance than its RTC 3 predecessor, which makes possible an enhanced software instruction set. Among the new instructions is an advanced arc command which supplements standard arc parameters via polygonal approximations.
The RTC 4 is supplied with DLL drivers for Windows XP/2000/NT4/ME/9x and is backward-compatible with the RTC 3 PC Interface Board. Expansion modules are available for controlling three-axis, dual-head and processing-on-the-fly scan systems. The RTC 4 is equipped with 16 digital inputs and 16 digital outputs for real-time control of external components. And SCANLAB's optional RTC I/O Board provides additional analog inputs and outputs.
