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Electro-Mechanical Breadboarding
System for 
Hands-on
Prototyping - Teaching - Research

What is EMB?

EMB is a breadboard system to facilitate the prototyping, teaching, and researching of electro-mechanical systems. 
It has been specifically designed for engineering education laboratories and prototyping shops, with engineers, researchers and students in mind.

Engineering disciplines, from entry level physics to mechatronics and robotics to advanced control systems, will benefit from EMB.

The modularity of the system, allows for the users to follow preset plants or to create their own designs.

From textbook diagrams to hands-on hardware:

Explore examples of how EMB can be used in the following engineering curriculum:

How does it work?

The system relies on a dovetail approach for precision locating and firmly securing each module. Inside each module there are core components such as encoder, potentiometer, motor, brake/clutch, bearings. By connecting the modules together, the user creates the plant and the control system.

Electro-Mechanical Breadboard

There are four main categories of modules: Actuators (red), Sensors (blue), Mechanical (green), and linear.

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The shaft of each module is used to transmit power and as an "information carrier" (position / speed / acceleration). Gears, pulleys, cams, linkages, couplers are some of the elements used to connect  shafts. 

The user can mount the modules to an optical breadboard, dovetail rail, or a custom plate. Our products work with Metric and Imperial optical breadboards.

Electro-Mechanical Breadboard
Electro-Mechanical Breadboard
Electro-Mechanical Breadboard

EMB is controller, amplifier, and DAQ agnostic. The users can choose from a variety of options, such as our DAQs, Arduino, STM32 Nucleo Development boards, BeagleBone, National Instruments hardware and software (LabVIEW), MATLAB/Simulink, Speedgoat hardware, or their own designs. 
Robots5 can help with the selection and implementation of these components.

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Below, is a comprehensive EMB implementation, with an EMB-DAQ1 real-time controller, EMB-IM1, maxon ESCON amplifiers, an E-Stop, a host computer, and an EMB plant:

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We have been collaborating with the open-source community (thank you Prof. Roberto Bucher and everyone involved) to provide a powerful control system environment, based on pysimCoder (https://github.com/robertobucher), completely free and open-source. 
The generated pysimCoder code is deployed to a target for Real-Time control.

Quality, Made in the USA!

Robots5 is committed to providing the absolute best products and services to our customers. All EMB items are proudly developed and manufactured in the USA.
At Robots5, we pride ourselves in taking no shortcuts, no hacks, and no "hobby grade" components! 
We only use premium suppliers and industrial grade components, in addition to rigorous engineering and design.

Electro-Mechanical Breadboard
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