BALDOR is celebrating the 21st birthday of the Mint motion control language.
Mint motion control language was created by UK start-up Optimised Control, which was acquired by Baldor Electric. Mint provides open programming for motion control hardware.
Mint stands for Motion Intelligence. It uses high-level keywords to simplify the development of motion control and I/O control, networking and HMI tasks on automation equipment.
According to Baldor, the software side of motion control can make a big difference to machinery project efficiency, timescales and cost. Critical factors include simplicity and ease of programming, configuration and set-up.
Baldor says many motion control vendors still tend to focus on hardware, with little insight into programming aspects. However, hardware integration is usually a small element of machine commissioning. Software accounts for most development time and there are big gains to be made by choosing the best development environment.
Mint has English-like commands, which were a revelation for the motion control community, who were used to programming with mnemonic codes. With high level commands and features like user-defined variable names, motion control programming started to become accessible to just about any engineer or technician.
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