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The purpose of the present study is to refurbish an existing
seven-axis probe manipulator which is a crucial part of a wind
tunnel at the National Taiwan Institute of Technology. The
servo controller of this probe manipulator was previously
designed and built by a former graduate student and was
reaching its limits, so the author replaced the original
controller with a commercial product called PMAC (Programmable
Multi-Axis Controller) and successfully integrated the PMAC
with the servo motors, servo amplifiers, traversing and rotary
mechanisms, and optical encoders that constitute the probe
manipulator. PMAC is a powerful control card, and it is easy to
learn and use. Detailed descriptions of the hardware and
software settings, and control commands are included in this
paper. The author also developed a new user interface to better
meet the demand of experimental measurements. Upon a
demonstration using a series of wind tunnel measurements, the
author concludes that the new system is functioning
satisfactorily with excellent positioning accuracy and
measurement data repeatability.
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