Tachon Systems

Product

A controller, a pendant, and the engine between them

You have the arm, the motors and the drivers. This is the part that makes them worth something.

Controller board Photograph pending. Shoot on neutral grey, terminals legible.
Hardware

Tachon Core

A locked real-time controller. Six step and direction channels, limit and home inputs, an E-stop input, and general I/O on labelled screw terminals. Level shifting for 5 V drivers is on the board, so DM542-class drivers connect directly.

Software

Tachon GUI

The teach pendant. It runs on your PC and opens in a browser: jog the arm, teach waypoints, write programs in Python, watch live telemetry. Reachable from a tablet on the same network.

Firmware

Tachon Motion Engine

Kinematics, planning, blending and step generation, running on the controller in hard real time. Start from a shipped preset or enter your own geometry, gear ratios and limits.

Specifications

Axes
Six step and direction channels with per-axis enable
Step generation
200 kHz DDS across all six axes, pulse timing configured per driver
Control rates
1 kHz servo loop and 1 kHz motion tick, on independent timers
Processor
600 to 720 MHz Cortex-M7 with a hardware double-precision FPU
Driver interface
3.3 V to 5 V level shifting on board
Inputs and I/O
Limit and home inputs per axis, a dedicated E-stop input, and general I/O for grippers and tooling
Host link
USB serial to a Windows PC
Firmware
Shipped pre-locked and cannot be read back off the chip. Encrypted updates, flashed by you from the pendant.

Model number and final terminal layout are not yet fixed. These figures describe the controller as it runs today.

Does it fit your build?

Most six-axis revolute serial arms fit, as long as the joints are driven by step and direction signals.

Arms

  • AR4 and AR4-class clones
  • PAROL6
  • Custom NEMA17 and NEMA23 builds

Drivers

  • DM542, DM556, TB6600
  • Closed-loop step and direction drivers
  • Some AC servo drives, which also take step and direction

Not supported

  • Drives that expect a fieldbus
  • Arms with more or fewer than six joints
  • Joints not driven by a pulse train
Safety notice

A six-axis arm can injure you

It is heavy, it is fast, and it does not know you are standing next to it.

Tachon Core is a controller for hobby and experimental machines. It is not a certified functional-safety controller. It carries no CE, UL, or functional-safety rating, and it has not been assessed against any machinery safety standard.

You are responsible for your own risk assessment, for guarding your machine, and for an emergency stop that removes power independently of any software. The E-stop in the pendant and the E-stop input on the board are control functions. They ask the controller to stop. They are not a safety-rated stop category, and they will not save you if the controller, the PC, or the wiring has failed.

Wire a hard E-stop that cuts motor power through a contactor, and treat everything on this page as convenience on top of it.

If that is not the right trade for your project, this is not the right controller.