The British DC drives specialist Sprint Electric has announced a distributed control system with graphical configuration tools that provide diagnostics and configurability of all the drives on a network, either locally or remotely via the Internet. These tools can be used to configure the drives, to perform diagnostics, to provide documentation and to act as an operator interface for local control, without needing a PLC or supervisory computer.

The system, sourced from the US-based supplier drive.web, includes hardware that gathers information dynamically from a drive and makes it available via Ethernet. It also includes interfaces to AC drives and remote I/O modules, allowing other control equipment to access the network.

The software runs on the platform-independent Java operating system, and can therefore be used on PCs, Macs or Linux-based computers. It provides graphical configuration and documentation tools for both AC and DC drives, and start-up and commissioning assistance with real time information coming from the drives and network.