Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Piezo controller question - followup.

A couple of weeks ago I posted:

Anyone out there using a Newport NPC3SG controller to drive a piezo positioning stage, with computer communication successfully talking to the NPC3SG?  If so, please leave a comment so that we can get in touch, as I have questions.

No responses so far.  This is actually the same unit as this thing:
https://www.piezosystem.com/products/piezo_controller/piezo_controller_3_channel_version/nv_403_cle/

In our unit from Newport, communications simply don't work properly.  Timeout problems.  The labview code supplied by Newport (the same code paired with the link above) has these problems, as do many other ways of trying to talk with the instrument.  Has anyone out there had success in using a computer to control and read this thing?   At issue is whether this is a hardware problem with our unit, or whether there is a general problem with these.  The vendor has been verrrrrrrrry slow to figure this out.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Doug- Do you want to try the XPS-DRVP1 controller instead?

Douglas Natelson said...

Thanks for the suggestion. Let me dig in and see if it would really work with our stage (NPXY200SG XY). I don't think it is, unfortunately....

Anonymous said...

I think that is the piezojena unit we use to control piezojena stages in my lab. Typically just use computer to control DAQ, which gives analog outputs to the controller, which obviously works fine. can't recall any issues talking directly to the controller, but ultimately we ended up using the DAQ as intermediary anyway (IIRC we switched to DAQ because we got more bit resolution that way or something like that).

Douglas Natelson said...

Anon@10:38, thanks. Pursuing that avenue as well, and I'm a big fan of analog control.

Paul B said...

I need to check the details but my lab uses a 3-axis piezo from Piezo Jena connected to a unit that is very similar to this. If I recall correctly, we use outputs from a high resolution National Instruments card to scan the piezo position.

What I can't remember (thank you to former student Jeremy W for writing fantastic code with minimal supervision) is how the unit acts as an intermediary - presumably it is needed to convert the NI card output to the suitable voltage range used by the piezo. I will check when I return from a round of travel...