Parker Compumotor

• Company: Parker Hannifin Corporation
• Product Types: Stepper Systems, Servo Systems, Motion Controllers
• Website: http://www.parkermotion.com
• Owned By: Parker Hannifin Corp.
• Headquarters: Cleveland, OH
• Made In: USA
• Ships from: Rohnert Park, CA

Compumotor was a pioneer in the early days of step motor control back when the computer industry used them in hard drive read heads. Located in the wine country of California, the founders of Compumotor created microstepping. In 1985, Compumotor was bought by the Parker Hannifin Corporation. The earliest products that are still in use were the 2100 series indexer, 3000 Series Indexer, and 4000 Series Indexer. These products were replaced by the A series microstepping drives and the AX series packaged Drive/Indexer. The 1980s saw the introduction of the S series Microstepping drives and SX series drive indexers, which utilized Compumotor's popular X Ware programming language. S and SX Drives and Drive/Indexers still have a large installed base as they were very popular with extensive capability for a single axis step motor package. These systems can be tricky to upgrade to current technology because of the extensive capability and BCD program select input feature that is not a current standard feature. Compumotor replaced the X language with the 6000 language and developed a series of microstepper and servo based products based on the very popular 6000 Series programming language. The 6200 and 6400 were standalone multi axis step motor controllers while the 6250 and 6450 were standalone analog servo controllers (AT6200, AT6400, AT6250, and AT6450 were ISA bus based). The APEX6151, APEX6152, and APEX6154 were standalone single axis drive/controllers based on the 6000 language. The ZETA4 (ZETA8, ZETA12) was the microstepping drive and ZETA6104 (ZETA6108, ZETA6112) was the single axis drive controller based on the 6000 language. Today these are legacy products in an extended lifetime mode and are relatively straightforward to upgrade to the current 6K language based platform, which added multitasking, PLC mode, Ethernet, and several other features, as well as 8 axis of coordinated control. These DIN based controllers are available in 2, 4, 6, and 8 axis versions as the 6K2, 6K4, 6K6, and 6K8. A lineup of 6K language based single axis drive/controllers is called the GT6K (stepper) and GV6K (servo).

Parker Hannifin Corporation bought Acroloop in 2001 and has developed the ACR series of controllers based on the ACR8100 and ACR8200 and the ACR control language. Today these are the ACR9000 series controllers. Compax3 based products are German based.