More space in the control cabinet thanks to compact controller family

Now B&R is launch­ing a new com­pact con­troller fam­i­ly called X20 Embed­ded. The devices com­bine per­for­mance and numer­ous inte­grat­ed inter­faces in a hous­ing just 55 mm wide. This makes the con­trollers half the size of com­pa­ra­ble devices.

Thanks to the pow­er­ful proces­sors from the Intel Atom series, the new con­trollers are also suit­able for demand­ing appli­ca­tions with short cycle times. The devices can even be used to con­trol ful­ly-fledged robot appli­ca­tions. Machine builders thus save costs and space in the con­trol cabinet.

The con­trollers come stan­dard with two USB ports, inte­grat­ed flash mem­o­ry and two Eth­er­net ports. Daisy-chain cabling can be eas­i­ly imple­ment­ed with the inte­grat­ed switch. There­fore, there are no addi­tion­al costs for the net­work infrastructure.

Integrated interfaces

Hard­ware inter­faces for POWERLINK and RS485 are also inte­grat­ed in the devices. Via the RS485 inter­face, the user can, for exam­ple, con­nect fre­quen­cy con­vert­ers direct­ly to the con­troller with­out any addi­tion­al hard­ware. The pow­er sup­ply is also inte­grat­ed. Despite the high per­for­mance, the con­trollers do not require a fan or bat­tery and are there­fore maintenance-free.

Option­al­ly, any oth­er field­bus pro­to­cols can be added. For this pur­pose, the con­trollers are option­al­ly avail­able with an inter­face slot. All B&R inter­face cards can be com­bined with devices from the X20 embed­ded series. Like­wise, all X20 I/O mod­ules can be added to the con­troller as usual.