Motion In

Motion in is used for high speed counting of digital input signals.  It’s a background task.  Once a Motion In Block is executed, it’ll continue counting in the background until another Motion In block set to Stop is executed.

To enable Motion In, Press the ‘Setup Hardware’ button.  It’s on the upper left of vBuilder.  Your ‘Setup Hardware’ button may look a little different from the one on the left, depending on whether you’ve setup your hardware and on the specific hardware you’re using.

The last page of the Setup Hardware lets you set Motion In (High-Speed Counter) options. There are 2 Motion In types: Pulsed Input and Quadrature Input.

Shown below is the setup pages for each Motion In type.  Click to enlarge.

Above shows 1 device setup for Motion In.  With Branch you can set up a Motion In for you Branch PLC and for every Expansion that has an Embedded Subroutine.

Pulsed Input

Pulsed Input requires 1 Digital Input.  After configuring in Setup Hardware, placing a Motion In Block brings up the following Dialog.

The Tag you select for ‘Count Value’ will store the Motion In’s count value.  Count Value must be of the I32 Data Type.  The Motion In block can be set to count up or down.  A count is triggered by either a rising (0 to 1) value, or a falling (1 to 0) value.  The ‘counter Input Bit’ that causes the count is the Digital Input that you selected in ‘Setup Hardware’.

<– Selecting Stop will stop the Motion In counter.

Quadrature Input

Quadrature Inputs are used with incremental rotary encoders.  Check out Wikipedia’s article on them to learn more.  They require 2 Digital Inputs.  Be sure not to use the same Digital Input for both Quadrature Inputs.

<– Start Counter requires an I32 Tag to store the count in.