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      With continued miniaturization, the requirements for sub micron control of high bandwidth, high resolution, low inertia systems are becoming more and more stringent. To match this demand, the motion control industry has steadily moved to more powerful and higher resolution platforms. This iterative process has continued to drive improvements in the PID control loop and its capabilities from 8 bit systems in the 1980's to today's 16 to 32 bit architectures. Any control system however is only as capable as it's 'weakest' component. 20 bit encoders, 32 bit processors and 16 bit DACs are of limited benefit when the resolution of the amplifier is typically limited to only 12 bits. A 16 bit amplifier with the same high PWM frequency of a 12 bit allows for the full performance capabilities of a modern control system.

Galil's gclib has been ported to Raspbian Jessie, an opertating system for Raspberry Pi. gclib is Galil's C-compatible application programming interface (API) for communicating with Galil motion controllers and PLCs. The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, small form factor single board computer. Raspbian Jessie is the latest operating system for Raspberry Pi hardware. The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is the hardware supported in this release.

    In June, 2014 Galil announced its EPICS Baseline support. EPICS is an acronym which stands for Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System. It is an open source, distributed software framework used extensively in “Big Physics” projects such as particle accelerators, telescopes, and other large-scale experimental installations.

   The RIO-574x0 series is Galil's first EtherCAT Slave I/O Controller.  This device is specifically designed to interface seamlessly with Galil's EtherCAT Master Motion Controller, the DMC-500x0, but it can also be used with any generic EtherCAT Master.