Introduction

This document describes some of the key features of the vx7500 designed by Vena Engineering Corporation.

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Features

Electrical

The electronics were designed to take advantage of new capabilities of modern analog and digital ICs. This design also included the requirement for reliability, and quick interchangeability. An overview of electrical features are as follows:

  • Modular (1U) rack mount design. Each controller is completely independent from the others. If an electrical error occurs on one controller, it will not migrate to the others.
  • Hot swappable electronic modules.
  • Ethernet based communications to the PC. This method of communications is a standard format allowing multiple applications to communicate the the controller simultaneously.
  • Precision timing. New tests require tight synchronization between motion control, data acquisition, and waveform generation. All functionality is coordinated from a single IC (FPGA).
  • Integrated 3-phase motion control.
  • Actuator position and spindle position data acquisition for disk mapping.
  • Digital filtering (FPGA based DSP). Digital filtering removes the need for fixed analog filters on signals like the AE and strain.
  • Digital RMS. Analog drift, which is common in small signal analog circuits, is non-existent in digital representations.
  • Waveform generation. Three analog outputs are available.
  • 24 bit data acquisition for low-speed channels and 16 bit resolution for high speed channels.

Software

The vx7500 software/drivers have the following features:

  • Designed specifically for 64 bit architecture (Windows, Mac, Linux).
  • Advanced scripting ability through Python.
  • 32 bit and 64 bit DLL