Sometimes machines don't have a physical shear. A downstream system cuts the part. The controller has always stopped for a shear whether there was one or not in order to do all of the bookkeeping that required the material to be stopped. This is annoying to customers and is inefficient.

Sometimes the customer is able to hide the shear operation in some other operation. Sometimes this is not possible or convenient.

Recent changes have allowed the controller to stitch parts by omitting shears without stopping for a shear operation. This gave us the ability to configure the controller, using a setup parameter, to do what has always been referred to as phantom shears. A phantom shear is basically the same as omitting a shear but still counting the part as complete.

A new setup called Phantom Shear Mode has been added to allow a customer to tell us that there is no shear so don't stop for the operation. It has two settings, No and Yes. It defaults to No. When set to Yes, all shears will be treated as Phantom.

Due to competing requirements and business priorities the setup is not available in Continuous Press mode when multiple presses are enabled. In continuous press mode a Phantom Shear will force the press into single stroke mode during the feed that contains the phantom shear. These limitations may be removed in the future when business priorities and time allow.

A request was made to make retrofitting Beck controllers on Viper systems easier.

These systems initiate Rollformer and Feeder motion with a Run signal. They create part separation through the Rollformer with a Delay After Shear like feature that slows the Feeder. We cannot use our Run signal to initiate material motion. That function belongs to the material motion outputs.

This requires us to provide three states of motion in the run mode for the Feeder, Stopped, Slow and Fast. If the Feeder is in Slow or Fast, the Rollformer on the Viper needs to be in motion.

The chosen solution was to allow the Delay After Shear feature to use the Slow speed to create the part separation rather than Stopped. This setup is available when our open loop motion outputs are provided to control material motion.

A new setup has been created called Delay After Shear Mode. It has two settings, Stop and Slow. It defaults to Stop, which causes Delay After Shear to Stop for the delay as it did before this change. Slow causes Delay After Shear to Slow for the delay.

One exception to this is if there is a Bundle Stop Delay that is active at the same time. If the part in question initiates the Bundle Stop, Bundle Stop takes precedence and the controller will stop for the delay instead.

Coil End Point and the Front Shear feature are intended to be mutually exclusive. If you have a Front Shear you don't need to enable the Coil End Point because the Front Shear implements an automated Coil End Point.

However, a customer had them both enabled and they were getting F0001 Task errors, which indicates something is preventing Inputs from being scanned. This is an indication of an infinite loop that does not give up CPU time for the input task to run..

The exact path of the infinite loop is unknown. What is known is that the Coil End Point was placing the controller into Coast To Stop mode at the same time as it was stopping for the Front Shear operation prompts.

To ensure Feed to Stop press tasks cannot use all of the CPU time in this mode the Feed to Stop function now tests for Coast to Stop mode. If the controller is already in Coast to Stop mode, the function will sleep until the controller has switched to Halted before proceeding.