Every so often, Galil is given the opportunity to support an application that can truly change the life of others. This last spring, Galil was contacted by a group of students from the University of Wisconsin asking for us to help them create SPOT.
SPOT, which stands for “Standing Paraplegic Omni-directional Transport” is a project aimed to help Dr. Garret Cuppels, a 37-year-old orthopedic surgeon, return to the emergency room after a tragic fall in 2010 that damaged the thoracic region of his spine and left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Since the SPOT device is to be used in the emergency room it had a specific set of requirements that other standard wheel chairs could not satisfy:

Customer’s needs for servo control has progressed over the years resulting in more exotic mechanics being introduced into the market.  Examples of some of these new mechanics are nonlinear systems such as articulated arms and spring-based mechanisms.

Joining the growing family of drive options for the DMC-30000 Pocket Motion Controller Series is the new DMC-30016 Stepper Drive. The DMC-30016 is a single axis motion controller combined with a 1.4A, 30V stepper drive in a cost-effective, compact package.
The DMC-30016 drive operates a two-phase bipolar stepper motor in full-step, half-step, 1/4 step or 1/16 step. It is user configurable from 0.5A to 1.4A per phase in 10mA increments at 12-30VDC. The dimensions of the DMC-30016 controller and drive package are 3.9” x 5.0” x 1.5”, and no external heatsink is required.

Figure 1: Artist's Rendering of the Thirty Meter Telescope

     Galil has a decades long history of collaboration with projects on the cutting edge of science. Astronomy, Physics, Biology, and Geology are some of the many fields of scientific research that call on the need for deterministic motion control and data collection. The ease of use and support offered by Galil makes it a natural fit for the rapid prototyping and automation that is characteristic of large scale scientific research.