RICHMOND, Calif., 11 March 2013. Mesa Electronics in Richmond, Calif., is introducing the 4I74 stackable PCI/104embedded computing eight-channel quadrature counter card for robotics, motor control, measurement, and instrumentation applications.
The 4I74 board for military embedded systems comes with eight quadrature up/down counters with quadrature count inputs, quadrature edge time stamping for velocity estimation and per channel index inputs.
The 4I74 has selectable TTL or RS-422 levels on its quadrature and index inputs. TTL or RS-422 operation is jumper selectable on a per input basis.
The differential RS-422 inputs are suited for relatively long cable lengths and are terminated. Eight RS-422 serial ports are provided== two of which can run in RS-485 mode. These ports can be used for asynchronous serial communication, SSIm or BISS encoder interfaces, Mesa Smart serial remote I/O communication, or other uses depending on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) firmware.
The encoder connectors are compatible with the 4I30 and 4I36, and counters can count in normal quadrature mode (4X) or up/down mode. Programmable digital filtering rejects input noise on encoder inputs, and counters may cleared individually. Each counter has a option to be cleared or latched either by the rising or falling edge of the index signal.
Maximum count rate of the 4I74 with TTL inputs is 4 million counts per second. Maximum count rate with RS-422 inputs is 10 million counts per second. The 4I74 uses a FPGA chip for all counting and I/O, so can be upgraded or modified in the field for specific requirements.
The FPGA configuration flash memory can be updated from the host, and no special cable or adapters are required. For more information contact Mesa Electronics online at www.mesanet.com.
