Among the many innovations on Siemens vast stand at the recent Hannover Fair, was a new operator panel for the company’s Sinamics G120 frequency inverters which, it says, will speed up their commissioning. The BOP-2 (basic operator panel) is designed to help both newcomers and drives experts to commission and troubleshoot the drives, and incorporates a commissioning “wizard”.

A two-line display allows status values of two parameters to be monitored continuously, enabling the causes of errors to be detected quickly and downtime to be minimised. Users can choose between automatic and manual modes of operation, and can use the panel control drives locally. The IP55-protected panels can be mounted either on the inverter or in a control cabinet door.

Siemens was also showing an embedded PC for real-time motion control applications. The Simotion P320-3 PC has no moving parts to wear, and is thus maintenance-free. It uses an embedded Windows operating system and Siemens’ own Simotion runtime system.

A built-in power supply bridges temporary power failures, while buffered SRAM memory saves process data securely, even if there is a sudden drop in voltage. The PC includes monitoring functions for its batteries, temperature and program execution. It can be used without a display or front panel however, if needed, these can be connected via a DVI interface. Other ports support communications via Profinet or Ethernet.