Introduction

The Bode Tool is a tool that makes it easy to get frequency domain data from your system. The Bode Tool is intended to make it easy to get the data a controls engineer needs to set up and tune the control system properly.

Features

The following features are available in the Bode Tool:

• Measurement of Closed Loop Response – Provides measurement of the closed loop frequency response of a single axis system using sine sweep and white noise excitation methods.



• Measurement for Two-Axis Systems – Provides measurement of a two-axis system simultaneously using the sine sweep method, exciting the two axes in or out of phase. This is useful for systems with cross-coupled axes (gantries, SCARA robots, etc.)



• Direct Measurement Using White Noise Excitation – Provides direct measurement of closed, open, plant, and controller frequency response of a system using a white noise excitation method. The Bode Tool allows users to specify controller addresses for FFT inputs and output points to create specific dual channel measurements limited only by the user’s imagination.



• Control Loop Configuration and Simulation – Allows configuration of control loop parameters for PID, PIV, and biquad post filters for quick, intuitive experimentation of controller response in simulation or on a live system. Additionally, has the ability to simulate changes to the control system without retesting, allowing control loop iteration cycles to be measured in seconds not hours.



• Plotting of Frequency Response Data – Allows plotting of frequency response data in Bode, Nyquist, real / imaginary vs. frequency, and amplitude vs. phase formats. The results are also made available as tab delimited text files for use in external analysis programs.



• Automatic Stability Measurements – The Bode Tool automatically makes quantitative stability measurements on both measured and simulated responses.



• Command Line Operation – Extensive command line parameter flags allowing automated testing from a batch file which useful for diagnosis and production line testing.



• Plant Measurement of a System – Allows for plant measurement of a system and simulate tuning, which provides the user to go from no tuning to high performance tuning in one step. No more trial and error tuning.



• Open Loop Response Simulation – Provides simulation the open loop response of a system from the closed loop response. A filter can be simulated and the filtered open and closed loop response can be simulated.

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