The industry is going through an important and revolutionary moment due to Industry 4.0. It has been driven by the integration of digital and hardware technologies, which require more intelligent, connected, flexible and predictive operations, enabling companies to reduce operating costs and be more competitive. In line with such global trend, WEG is expanding the PLC500 programmable logic controller family, releasing two new versions: PLC500MC (Motion Controller) and PLC500ED (Edge Device).

For the Motion Control segment, where servo drives (servomotors and servo-converters) are widely used, WEG is releasing the PLC500MC controller, dedicated to the advanced control of complex systems for interpolated axes motion, tangential motion, belt drives, cams, robots, CNC systems and so on. This controller has a powerful processing system and can operate up to 32 axes — real and virtual, simple or interpolated, featuring:

- A G-code converter, which accelerates the programming of motion for the execution of simple or complex geometric shapes, especially used in CNC systems

- A cam editor for synchronization of integrated motions

- Embedded IoT

- A tool library of the CODESYS programming platform.

The PLC500ED (Edge Device) model, on the other hand, has edge processing technology, which means that in addition to the medium to high complexity operations inherent in controller programming, it can also interact actively and rationally with cloud platforms. Therefore, it is possible to improve the response time (latency) allowing processing virtually in real time, enabling and improving the performance of several applications. With this technology, local tasks are quickly executed, without the need for cloud-based decisions, thus reducing the demand on data center infrastructure and increasing the response speed. In short, data is processed, analyzed and stored close to where it is generated to allow for faster analyses and responses. The PLC500ED controller also has the WEGnology® library on the CODESYS® platform, simplifying the integration and development of various applications on the WEGnology or WEG Smart Machine platform.

Learn more about all the resources that the PLC500 platform offers.