Fine Wire Take-up with Servo Driven Capstan Puller

This is a quick demonstration of our Capstan Winder pulling fiber from a simple payoff unit here on this table. The belt capstan is going to pull fiber from the payoff.  You can open up the Capstan, put the fiber in, and close it back up again, and it winds up on a new spool via our OTT-based takeup system, which has a traversing head on it. I’m going to run through some of the controls. Note that this machine is not finished. There aren’t button labels on there yet or other markings and warning labels. We’ve got on here our touch screen interface that we’ll go through. This knob here is the speed adjust for the takeup section only. You just set that to be faster than you’re ever going to need. Then the Takeup will pull the wire at the desired tension and synchronize automatically with the rate coming from the Capstan, limited by the speed set by that knob. And also here, are your tension settings where the number shown on the display is the amount of current going into the internal clutch of the takeup section. You can adjust that current here to pull very gently on the material being wound, and obviously your power switch and your E-Stop. This light here is a flashing indicator where we can set a desired length through the touchscreen. The way this machine is setup, it won’t stop when the length is reached. The light will just begin flashing to alert an operator to come over and manage the spool somehow. It’s no problem to also setup the machine to automatically stop when a target length is reached. Or both – stop and flash the light if needed. 

So I will go through the screens real quick. Here is the main splash screen. We call this the Pull-n-Spool, and you can see your Settings, Jog screen, and main Wind screen you can go to. I’ll go to the Settings screen. And here we can set the wind parameters, basic parameters: the speed you want to wind at. This particular machine is set up to wind at speeds down to about 1 foot per minute up to about 100 feet per minute. You can set any length you want. Set the field – the keypad comes up. Maybe I’ll set 50 feet. So that’s our new length target. Go back here. The Feed Screen is a password locked screen, which you go into to adjust the settings for the capstan, which you wouldn’t want to do all the time, which is why it is password protected. We have our Jog Speeds, jogging the capstan, you can set a speed in there – just by pressing the field, adding your value in the keypad, and coming back out. 

You can display metric units or English units. Right now it’s set for English units. We will keep it there for now.  We can lock out this operator screen with the next button, or actually save all of your settings with the Save button. Therefore when you power back up again, everything you entered will be saved in there. 

Come back to the Main Screen. Jogging is just jogging your feed. You can also turn your take-up motor off and on through there. Let’s go to our Wind screen. Right now we are set for a target speed of 10 feet per minute. By the way, I can change these settings right on the screen here. I will go slow. 5 feet per minute.  We are set for 50 feet. I’ll leave that there. Right now we have a value in there – this is our actual column where it shows what we’ve already wound. I’ll reset that value to zero. It asked me to confirm if I want to really do that so I’ll say, “Yes.” Now we’re at zero. And when I am ready I just hit wind. It again prompts me if I want to reset my length counter to zero. We already did so I’ll say, “No.” And it will just begin winding. 

So there’s our take-up going – just automatically synchronizing with the rate from the capstan – being pulled from the payoff unit. So you can see it is very slow at the moment. For demo sake, I’ll speed it up. Let’s go 20 feet per minute. So now we are going a lot faster. 

You can see it accumulating on the actual foot counter. Let’s go faster. So this take-up section will only pull the material as hard as you want. If I put some resistance on the spool, it will stop it. I don’t want to do that right now because it will mess up my winding a little bit coming from the capstan. But you can see our result. You get a pretty nice, even wind from it. I can adjust the wind spacing here. We have a pitch dial right here, on the actuator. And if I need to adjust to match my flange widths, I do that here on the front of the actuator. 

So you can see, we reached our target length of 50 feet. We are up to 71 feet now. The machine hasn’t stopped because it is not designed to do that. Our indicator light is flashing to let an operator know to come over and take care of things. I’ll just stop now. When I hit stop, it prompts me if I really want to stop. I’ll say, “yes.” So there you go.