Kingstar

KINGSTAR’s complete motion control and machine vision platform creates PC-based motion controllers with premium precision and performance. Built on the EtherCAT standard and enhanced by the power of a real-time operating system (RTOS) for Windows, you can use a single industrial PC to deliver software-only motion control and machine vision automation quickly and cost effectively.

KINGSTAR eliminates the need for proprietary, hardware and individual solutions for industrial machine automation. Through pre-tested, pre-integrated, and best-of-breed software components, KINGSTAR is the only machine automation platform that provides the freedom and flexibility of ‘plug-and-play’ choices, reducing cost by up to half while delivering precision performance and quality.

As a comprehensive, open and standards-based platform, KINGSTAR enables engineers to design, develop and integrate motion control and machine vision applications with either KINGSTAR’s soft motion library and software PLC or one of their own choosing. Built on the foundation of EtherCAT and a real-time 64-bit Windows operating system, it provides a complete “plug-and-play” platform for control and automation engineering.

The KINGSTAR Soft Motion Platform consists of the following end-to-end components:

• KINGSTAR Soft Motion - provides an integrated environment for consolidated, inexpensive and scalable motion control. Soft Motion runs directly on the PC, uses the NIC card for I/O, and uses the powerful EtherCAT protocol for freedom from proprietary and costly hardware.
• KINGSTAR EtherCAT - exposes the real-time interface that allows engineers to integrate their own motion algorithms or software with an EtherCAT network, providing highly customizable motion control with precision performance.
• KINGSTAR Soft PLC - provides a fully-featured software PLC, with an open and accessible RTOS, and managed by a rich user interface for C++ and non-C++ developers alike for application management and deployment that enables complete and consolidated control of assembly lines and machinery
• KINGSTAR Machine Vision, powered by Matrox, allows engineers to build interactive applications and functions for image capture, processing, analysis, annotation, display, and archiving on GigE Vision®, USB3 Vision™ and other camera devices.
• IntervalZero RTX64, the foundation of the KINGSTAR platform, replaces FPGAs and DSPs by transforming Windows into a real-time OS (RTOS), reducing development costs and significantly improving the quality of embedded systems.

KINGSTAR is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts and has offices in Nice, France, Munich, Germany and Taipei City, Taiwan. The company is an EtherCAT Technology Group, Mechatrolink Member, PLCopen, OPC Foundation, Intel Embedded Alliance and Microsoft Embedded Gold Partner. For more information, visit http://kingstar.com/